May 15 (Bloomberg) -- PetroChina Co. may cancel a plan to build a 50 billion-yuan ($7.1 billion) refinery and chemical plant outside Chengdu, near an area struck this week by China's largest earthquake in 58 years.

The nation's biggest oil company will study the proposed site to assess whether it is prone to natural disasters, Chairman Jiang Jiemin said at the company's annual general meeting in Beijing today. A taskforce has been formed to examine the earthquake's impact on the location at Pengzhou, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Chengdu, he said.

The 7.9-magnitude quake three days ago killed almost 15,000 people, injured about 65,000 and left at least 30,000 people buried, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It destroyed or damaged houses and other buildings in 44 counties and districts in Sichuan, with about half of the 20 million population of the area directly affected.

Fuel supplies to Sichuan are ``tight'' after the suspension of a fuel pipeline to the area this week, Jiang said. The pipeline linking its Lanzhou refinery in Gansu province with Sichuan restarted on May 13.

Chengdu, the Sichuan capital, has enough gasoline stockpiled to last for five days and enough diesel for three days, Jiang said.

Missing Workers

Fifty-six PetroChina workers were injured in the quake and six are missing, Jiang said. The company lost contact with about 40 workers on 12 oil-transportation trucks during the disaster.

PetroChina shut 76 oil-drilling rigs in the quake-affected area. Of these, 60 have now resumed, Jiang said. The temblor affected 728 of PetroChina's retail gasoline stations.

PetroChina and Sichuan authorities signed an agreement for a refinery and a petrochemical plant in March 2007. The refinery will process about 200,000 barrels a day of oil and the ethylene cracker will make 800,000 tons of the chemical annually, provincial Communist Party Secretary Du Qinglin said at the time.

Shelving the plant, while crimping planned refinery expansions, may partly shield PetroChina from increased plant construction costs and widening losses from processing crude oil.

``The company will save money from delays of any sort in the near term,'' said Larry Grace, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Kim Eng Securities Ltd. ``Fuel pipelines could mitigate some of the higher transportation costs from not having a refinery near the end-users.''

Chengdu Protests

As many as 500 people demonstrated in Chengdu on May 4 over potential air and water pollution and health hazards from the plants to be built just outside the city, the International Herald Tribune reported.

The Pengzhou project underwent almost 20 years of assessment and research, and the government has approved the project after careful consideration, Jiang said today. The plant wouldn't cause serious pollution to surrounding areas, except potentially in a natural disaster, he said.

The quake struck on May 12 at 2:28 p.m., about 75 kilometers from Chengdu, a metropolitan area that is home to 11 million people. The quake was the world's strongest since an 8.5-magnitude temblor struck Indonesia in September, according to the USGS.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ying Lou in Hong Kong at ylou1@bloomberg.net; Wang Ying in Beijing at wang30@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 15, 2008 03:03 EDT