OREANDA-NEWS. March 14, 2011. Turkmenistan, the holder of the world’s fourth-largest natural gas reserves, will start pumping first gas from its South Yoloten field to China in late 2013, said Petrofac Ltd. (PFC), the contractor.

Petrofac, an oilfield services and engineering provider, is working on the USD3.4 billion second phase of the South Yoloten field development. The project will take about 32 months to reach 10 billion cubic meters a year of pumping capacity, which later can be doubled, the company said today in a statement.

“The Chinese are building the pipeline,” Chief Executive Officer Ayman Asfari said today in an interview. The development can be the “trigger and the driver for development of additional gas prospects” in the eastern part of the country.

China is turning to Turkmenistan for more gas as Russia’s OAO Gazprom, the world’s biggest producer, has yet to agree on prices and pipeline routes with Asia’s fastest-growing market. Turkmenistan plans to extract as much as 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year from the South Yoloten area, according to the Turkmen government.