State-owned China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) revealed ambitious plans on April 9 to significantly ramp up its fleet of LNG vessels to position itself to take a larger slice of the pie in the global LNG resale market, Bloomberg reported.

China’s largest natural gas supplier revealed that its trading arm PetroChina International will scale-up production of LNG vessels. PetroChina has set a target of possessing 25 LNG tankers by 2030, which marks a massive fourfold increase from the company’s current fleet size.

A number of factors appear to be behind the decision, such as China’s emergence as the largest importer of LNG globally, record domestic production of LNG, and a spike in supplies delivered from Russia.

Additionally, PetroChina is also currently flush with cash after posting record annual profits as the state-run firm has dominated China’s gas market, providing an ideal environment for the firm to be more aggressive and put in a bid to challenge the world’s largest energy traders in the LNG market.

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