English

By Yin Lei

Cities in China are beginning to adjust the local natural gas prices as part of the country's efforts to reform this clean energy's pricing mechanism.

On Tuesday, Beijing raised the price of natural gas by RMB 0.35 per cubic meter for residential consumption and lowered those for other non-residential uses.

This move was made in line with a notice publicized in May by the National Development and Reform Commission, which aimed to align the different prices of this energy consumed by  different types of users.

As required by this notice, residential natural gas should no longer follow the previous price ceiling but instead a benchmark base price that had been applicable to its non-residential counterparts. Price for natural gas may go below this benchmark but should not exceed it by over 20 percent.

Other places in China, such as cities in Shaanxi Province and Hebei Province, had also scheduled price hearings for the next few weeks.

As China persists with its efforts to fight pollution, its demand for natural gas has been on a steady rise.

It experienced a supply shortage of this clean energy last winter when the need for heating led to a surging demand. Along with this surge, natural gas prices also climbed sharply.

Such a robust demand has been driving up the imports of this energy in 2018.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed 34.8 million tons of natural gas had been imported from January to May, pushing up the ratio between imports and domestic production from 0.64:1 to 0.71:1.

For the same period, China's natural gas consumption reached a total of 112.7 billion cubic meters, up by 17.6 percent year-on-year.

China is expected to become the largest importer of natural gas in 2019, according to a forecast by the International Energy Agency in late June.