PetroChina has started to lay a 1,200-km (745 miles) pipeline to move refined oil from China's northwest to consumers in the southwest.

It's China's longest oil products pipeline. PetroChina would invest nearly four billion yuan ($480 million) in the pipeline. The project is expected be completed and put into operation in June, 2002.

The project was designed to pipe five million tonnes of oil a year (102,700 bpd) from Lanzhou in northwest Gansu province to the city of Chengdu and Chongqing in China's most populous Sichuan province in the first phase. Capacity would be expanded to 10 million tonnes a year at the final stage.

The pipeline would be used mainly to move diesel and gasoline, but it could also carry jet fuel and naphtha.

The pipeline, when completed, was also seen boosting refinery throughputs at Petrochina's refineries in the northwest, especially the 113,000 bpd Lanzhou Refining & Chemical Corp.

Petrochina, which runs refineries and oilfields in China's north and west, has to move surplus oil products to the consuming areas in the south.