A PetroChina gas station in Yichang, Central China’s Hubei Province Photo: CFP

An oilfield branch of PetroChina, China's largest oil and gas producer, announced their discovery of a huge natural gas belt with an estimated reserve of over 1 trillion cubic meters in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gasfield Company (SWOG) completed a successful test of prospecting for oil and gas in Tianbao Township of Daying County, which had a daily output of 1.22 million cubic meters of gas, according to the SWOG.

The belt, some 130 km away from the provincial capital of Chengdu, neighbors the gasfield in the Gaoshiti-Moxi area in the middle part of the Sichuan Basin, where the current natural gas production capacity reaches 15 billion cubic meters annually.

Based in Chengdu, SWOG supplies natural gas to more than 1,000 large and medium-sized industrial companies and more than 20 million households in southwest China.