OREANDA-NEWS. December 06, 2013. Tethys Petroleum Ltd., an explorer focused on Central Asia, plans to export Kazakh natural gas to China and double its output after securing a Chinese partner.

Tethys plans to increase gas production in Kazakhstan to about one million cubic meters (6,100 barrels of oil equivalent) a day from about 3,000 barrels now, said the company’s Executive Chairman David Robson. The Guernsey, U.K.-based company, may export the gas eastward as soon as 2015 through the planned Kazakhstan-China pipeline after agreeing to sell half of its fields to a unit of Hanhong Private Management Co, based in Beijing.

“We can do it fairly quick,” Robson said last week in an interview in London, Bloomberg reported.

Tethys produces most of its oil and gas in Kazakhstan. It teamed up with Total SA and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) last December to explore the Bokhtar area in Tajikistan, which is adjacent to Galkynysh, Turkmenistan’s largest gas field. If gas is discovered there, it may also be exported to China, Robson said in February.

CNPC started building a pipeline from Kazakhstan’s largest city of Almaty to the town of Khorgos on the Kazakh-Chinese border earlier this year. In September, Kazakhstan’s gas transportation company KazTransGas and its partner started filling a section between the towns of Bozoi and Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan. Both sections will be part of the longer pipeline from the Caspian Sea to China, Caspian Barrel reports.