CHINA National Petroleum Corp and partner Chevron Corp have started drilling at the Chuandongbei gas project in southwest China's Sichuan Province, CNPC said yesterday.

The two firms signed a 30-year production sharing contract in late 2007 to develop the high-sulfur gas project using technology from Chevron. The Chuandongbei project is China's biggest onshore upstream gas cooperation project with a foreign company.

Chevron holds a 49 percent stake in the project and will be the operator. Chevron in 2007 said they planned a designed capacity of 740 million cubic feet a day at the proposed gas plants in Chuandongbei, which covers nearly 2,000 square kilometers.