PETROCHINA Co may cancel a plan to build a 50-billion-yuan (US$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 yesterday. A task force has been formed to examine the earthquake's impact on the location at Pengzhou, about 30 kilometers north of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, he said.
Fuel supplies to the province 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 Tuesday.
Chengdu has enough gasoline stockpiled to last for five days and enough diesel for three days, Jiang said. PetroChina shut 76 oil-drilling rigs in the quake-hit area. Of these, 60 have now resumed. 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, Bloomberg News said.