The China National Offshore Oil Corporation(CNOOC), China's largest offshore oil and gas producer,announced Monday that its gas-made fertilizer project in south China's Hainan Province was approved by the government to go into official production Thursday.

Located at Dongfang city of Hainan Province, the project uses natural gas produced by the Dongfang 1-1 gas field and has a designed annual output of 450,000 tons of synthetic ammonia and 800,000 tons of big pellet carbamide.

A major project of China's Tenth Five-Year Plan 2001-2005), the project is the biggest single carbamide-making installation of China and the first project in the downstream of the oil and gas industry of the CNOOC.

Started in Jan. 2002, the project was put into trial production at the end of 2003. The construction period was 21 months, the shortest among similar installations in the world.

With an investment of 2.19 billion yuan (264 million US dollars), the project saved 490 million (59.2 million US dollars) yuan over the projected cost of 2.686 billion yuan (324.4 million US dollars).

In 2004, the project produced a total of 814,700 tons of bid pellet carbamide, 105 percent of the designed output capacity and breaking the annual output record of large fertilizer installations of the country. The cost is only 98.3 percent of the contract designed standard.

Source: Xinhua