China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) said on Wednesday it will spend more than 150 billion yuan ($22 billion) by 2020 to boost oil and gas production in the western region of Xinjiang, aiming to offset falling output from aging fields in northeast China. The increased spending will push output in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region to more than 50 million tonnes of oil equivalent between 2018 and 2020, CNPC said. The investment is equivalent to the total expenditure by CNPC’s listed unit PetroChina, China’s top oil and gas producer, for oil and gas exploration and production in 2017. CNPC’s Xinjiang operations churned out 11.45 million tonnes of crude oil last year, while the company produced 23.5 billion cubic meters of gas, equivalent to 17.1 million tonnes of gas, from the Tarim in the region, one of China’s largest gas basins, according to PetroChina’s 2017 annual report. Based […]