China Starts Filling Lanzhou Emergency Petroleum-Reserve Tanks, CNPC Says

China started filling its emergency petroleum reserve at Lanzhou in the nation’s northwest, according to an official at the nation’s largest crude producer.

The oil is from fields in Gansu province and Xinjiang in northwestern China and Central Asian countries, Yu Baocai, a vice president at China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPZ), said in Beijing today.

China, the world’s second-largest crude consumer, finished filling the first phase of its emergency stockpile with 103.2 million barrels of oil in 2009. The second phase, comprising eight locations with a storage capacity of 168.6 million barrels, is scheduled to be completed by early 2013. The Lanzhou depot has a capacity of 18.9 million barrels.

The nation imports 10 million metric tons of crude a year, or 200,000 barrels a day, from Central Asia via a pipeline from Kazakhstan that started in 2006. The annual capacity of the cross-border oil line, China’s first, will rise to 20 million tons by 2013, according to CNPC.

To contact the reporter on this story: Winnie Zhu in Shanghai at wzhu4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alexander Kwiatkowski at akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net