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From the article:
China is the world’s largest importer of natural gas and the largest consumer of fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. China also has the biggest chemicals industry, much of which requires natural gas as well.
The country has other supply options besides the storage tanks, which hold liquefied natural gas brought in by sea. It has constructed pipelines to gas fields in Central Asia and Russia. China has developed coal-based processes that can replace natural gas in making some kinds of chemicals. And China has more than doubled its domestic production of natural gas in the past decade through fracking and other technologies.
While the United States now leads the world in oil and natural gas production by a wide margin, China is the fourth-largest producer of natural gas, trailing only the United States, Russia and Iran. China is the fifth-largest oil producer, behind the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Canada.
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Beijing’s top leaders have long been preoccupied with their country’s vulnerability to pressure from the American or Indian Navy on their seaborne supply of oil and natural gas from the Middle East. The country’s programs to develop solar and wind power and electric cars as alternatives to oil all moved into high gear 20 years ago.
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China’s expansion of strategic stockpiles of fossil fuels is more recent, an effort pushed by its top leader, Xi Jinping. He has uttered dark warnings about the challenges facing the globe and the need for China to depend on commodities and technologies found within its borders.
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China’s natural gas reserves, together with imports from places that are not affected by fighting in the Mideast, like Australia, Turkmenistan and Russia, are ample for home heating and cooking. Households, including residential electricity use, represent less than 15 percent of China’s natural gas consumption. China is also finishing its second consecutive warm winter, and residential gas demand has dropped steeply with the end of the heating season last month.
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Natural gas is particularly difficult to store. The easiest approach is to keep it underground by pumping it into salt caverns or into previously exhausted underground natural gas fields near big cities. But China has few of these caverns and fields relative to its enormous population.
That has prompted it to pursue a technologically audacious strategy: storing enormous quantities of supercooled gas as a liquid in aboveground storage tanks. The state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation disclosed in December that it had built 18 of its largest size of storage tanks for liquefied natural gas — more than twice as many as the rest of the world combined.
South Korea is constructing seven equally large L.N.G. tanks about 75 miles south of Seoul, to be completed in stages by the end of 2029. Japan has also begun building slightly smaller storage tanks.
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The row of enormous storage tanks in Yancheng holds liquefied natural gas at a temperature of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 162 degrees Celsius. When the gas is allowed to warm gradually to room temperature through a system of pipes, it expands 600-fold. The tanks in Yancheng are connected to a long pier into the Yellow Sea to unload L.N.G. from ships.
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China has one more tool to make sure it has enough natural gas: making less fertilizer for export. Analysts say that since the start of the war in Iran, China has already halted most of its overseas fertilizer sales.
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