The five-year plan will see the Hong Kong-listed company expand its oil and gas pipelines by 15,000 kilometers (9,000 miles), the company said in a statement on the website of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

Most of the pipelines will be concentrated around oil and gas fields and refineries in southwest, northwest and northeastern China, the company said.

Of the 15,000 kilometers of pipelines to be completed by 2010, 8,000 kilometers will be used for natural gas transportation, 3,000 for crude oil and 4,000 for refined oil, it said.

Part of a pipeline to pump crude oil from neighboring Kazahkstan to PetroChina's refinery in Dushanzi, in the nation's westernmost Xinjiang region, is expected to go online by the end of the year, the company added.

Last month, PetroChina's parent company, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) announced a 4.18 billion dollars buy-out of the Canadian-listed Kazakh oil and gas company PetroKazakhstan Inc.

Earlier this year, PetroChina won regulatory approval to spend 3.3 billion dollars to double the Dushanzi processing capacity to 10 million tons by 2008.

The expansion would make the plant China's largest crude processing facility with most of the oil brought in through the 3,000-kilometre (1,860-mile) oil pipeline from the Central Asian country to Xinjiang.

Historically high oil prices coupled with strong demand in China boosted PetroChina's first half net profit by 36.1 percent to 61.6 billion yuanbillion US dollars), the company said late last month.

"We have seen a sound performance in our major business segments during the first half of 2005," the company said, adding it was confident of realising full-year financial targets.

The sharp year-on-year rise was reflected in sales which rose to 252.49 billion yuan for the half from 178.4 billion in the previous period.

During the period, the company's oil and gas output combined amounted to 481 million barrels of oil, up 5.3 percent, while it produced 397 million barrels of crude oil, up 2.1 percent.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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