The company’s paper said that the annual capacity of the gas pipeline will reach 30 billion cubic meters of gas by 2012.

The current pipelines, which span nearly 2,000 kilometres in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before entering China's northwestern Xinjiang region, have shipped 13.68 billion cubic meters of gas to China as of early 25 August, the paper said.

Central Asia Gas Co, a CNPC unit in charge of building and operating gas pipelines in the central Asia countries through joint ventures with local companies, will start laying two new pipelines this year and put them into operation by 2013.

The company has set a goal of running nearly 7,000 km of gas pipelines through central Asian countries with 55-60 bcm of annual transportation capacity by 2015, the newspaper report said.