By Yin Lei
China's natural gas imports may top the world in 2019 to meet its surging demand for this clean energy, as reported by the Shanghai Securities News on Friday.
This forecast was announced in Shanghai by Keisuke Sadamori, an official of the International Energy Agency (IEA), at a launch event for a 2018 natural gas market report jointly prepared by the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange (SHPGX).
This report predicted an average annual growth of eight percent in China's natural gas demand up to 2022, when it may account for over one-third of the four trillion cubic meters of global natural gas consumption. By 2023, China's natural gas imports will rise to 171 billion cubic meters and most of them will be liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Last year, China overtook South Korea to become the second largest importer of LNG after Japan, according to Zhang Yuqing, deputy director of the National Energy Administration. "Efforts will be made to increase the share of natural gas in China' energy consumption to ten percent," he said at the above event.
Zhang believed that in this respect stable sources of supply and competitive prices are crucial and natural gas can enter China either through the pipelines or in the form of LNG.
The demand for natural gas has been going up in China as this country steered toward green development. Last winter, in particular, a supply shortage and the ensuing price hikes of this energy hit several of its northern provinces.
With domestic output for now seeing no big growth potential, the solution mostly lies in imports. China's energy giants are already on the move in this regard. From January to May, natural gas imports by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) increased by 44 percent to 14.4 billion cubic meters.
China's import sources were also expanding. In the first quarter of 2018, it bought natural gas from 24 countries and regions, compared to the number of 18 for the whole year of 2017.
In 2017, China's dependence on foreign natural gas was close to 40 percent and this figure is expected to climb further.
