Gas pipeline to Russia has biggest pipes in China

World Today

Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (L, front) and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a construction ceremony of the Russian part of the China-Russia East Route natural gas pipeline in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia, Russia on Sept. 1, 2014. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

China used pipelines with the largest caliber and bearing pressure in the country for the Chinese section of the China-Russia East Route Natural Gas Pipeline, which began construction on Monday.

The pipeline is expected to be in service in 2018. The nearly 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) pipeline, extending from gas fields in Russia’s Far East to Shanghai, is designed to transport 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia to China every year.

To ensure the transmission security, China uses a pipeline with a about a yard and a half caliber — the largest of its kind in China — in the project.

“It’s the first time for China to use X80 steel pipeline with a caliber of 1,422 millimeters. The pipelines used in the project are the ones with largest-caliber and largest per-pipeline transmission quantity, ” said Zhang Wenwei, chief engineer of Design Institute of China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau.

“China’s independently-developed CPP900 automatic welding-tracking technology is also used in the construction, a world-class technology. It will automatically rectify the difference in the welding, very automatic and artificially intelligent. It will not only improve the construction quality, but also increase the efficiency by 150 percent,” said Zhang Feng, director of CPPB Construction Equipment Research Institute.

A total of 38 billion-cubic-meter natural gas will be transferred to China each year after the project is finished, reducing the emission of carbon dioxide by 163.78 million tons, sulfur dioxide by 1.82 million tons, nitric oxides by 460,000 tons and dust by 840,000 tons compared to the use of coal.

Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev attended a televised inauguration ceremony that was held simultaneously in the cities of Beijing, Moscow, and the border city of Heihe in northeast China.

Story by CCTV News.