Almost all of the 2,600 production staff in PetroChina's Changqing Gas Field in northwest China will continue working during this year's Spring Festival holiday to guarantee the natural gas supply to 15 big cities in north China, said a senior company executive.

Sun Shuguo, director of the company's production control office, said on Monday that the company's production had been in high gear to meet the soaring demand for winter heating in north China since late January.

"It will be our busiest Spring Festival. I have never seen nearly all of my colleagues at work in the holiday," said Luo Shan, a 23-year-old technician, who has given up the Spring Festival for three years.

She said she could understand the demand, since temperatures outside her production workshop had dropped to minus 25 degrees Celsius.

Changqing's average daily gas output was 37.5 million cubic meters so far this month, two million cubic meters more than in January, and about 11 million cubic meters more than the same period last year, said Sun.

Gas was piped to 15 big cities in north China, including Beijing and Tianjin municipalities and Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, where authorities have increased demand for the clean energy in their efforts to curb urban pollution.

The field, one of China's three gas reserves with an annual gas output of at least 10 billion cubic meters, has a verified reserve of 2.1 trillion cubic meters in west China's Ordos Basin.

It yielded 11 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2007. The output target this year is 15.4 billion cubic meters. Beijing, which has consumed nearly half of the gas piped from the field, is still the company's primary consumer.

(Xinhua News Agency February 5, 2008)