China's national oil and gas pipeline operator PipeChina has begun construction on the first phase of its Mengxi pipeline project, which will link existing national trunklines and facilitate the flow of domestic and imported gas to the key demand centre of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei in north China.
The first, 6.6bn m³/yr capacity phase of the Mengxi project run for 413.5km from the 2.2mn t/yr Tianjin LNG receiving facility to the Dingxing sub-transmission station at Baoding in Hebei province.
The Mengxi trunkline is designed to facilitate the continuous flow of gas from the Tianjin LNG terminal to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area and other northern China regions. It will help to connect such national gas pipelines as the Sino-Russian eastern pipeline, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei natural gas pipeline branch network and gas storage facilities in north China.
Completion dates for each phase of the project are unclear. But PipeChina said a second phase may release a "bottleneck" at the Tianjin LNG receiving facility, allowing it to supply 25 counties along its route including the new Xiong'an area with 6.6bn m³/yr of gas output as well as imported LNG. PipeChina operates a floating storage regasification unit as an import terminal at Tianjin.
The Mengxi pipeline will be the first trunkline connecting to Xiong'an, a new urban district being developed in Hebei province that was launched by China's president Xi Jinping in 2017.
PipeChina took over China's oil and gas networks from the state-owned oil and gas majors when it started operations on 1 October last year.
