TOP Chinese oil and gas firm PetroChina plans to expand its crude oil storage capacity in several provinces to increase its ability to cope with potential supply shocks, State media reported Thursday. The company¡¯s Dalian subsidiary will increase its storage capacity six fold by next year, according to the China Petrochemical News, a newspaper run by China Petrochemical Corp., or Sinopec Group, China¡¯s largest refiner.

The Dalian Petrochemical Corp. will build a further 25 oil tanks, with storage capacity of 100,000 cubic meters each, in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, the report said, without citing a source. Dalian¡¯s current 540,000 cubic meters of storage capacity will rise to 740,000 cubic meters by October when two new tanks under construction are due to be completed, the report said.

Total capacity at Dalian would rise to 3.24 million cubic meters in 2008 if the planned expansion is completed on schedule, roughly equivalent to the capacity at China¡¯s third strategic oil reserve base, Huangdao, where the fi rst batch of 12 tanks were recently ready for use. It did not say how much investment was needed to fund the expansion. PetroChina will also add crude oil tanks in northern Tianjin Municipality and Dushanzi in northwestern Xinjiang region according to arrangements by its parent company China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), the newspaper said.

It did not provide the size of the planned capacity increase or investment. CNPC has already started construction on China¡¯s fourth strategic oil reserve base in Dalian, but progress has been slower than at other bases as local residents refused to be relocated to make way for the base, a local source said. China completed its fi rst reserve facility in Zhenhai in eastern Zhejiang Province less than a year ago, while the second in nearby Aoshan took in its fi rst cargo of crude oil last month.

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