PetroChina oil field escapes quake damage

PetroChina Co., the world’s biggest company by market value, said it escaped damage to its oil fields in Tarim Basin from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck northwestern China at 6:33 a.m. local time on Friday.

“Our fields are far away from the quake,”spokesman Mao Zefeng said. “So far we haven’t received any reports of damage to oil and gas production in the Tarim fields.”

The earthquake struck 230 kilometers (143 miles) southeast of the town of Hotan, in Xinjiang province, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of casualties in the most powerful quake to hit the country in almost six years.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the nation’s second- biggest oil producer, expects no “major impact”on its oil fields operations in Xinjiang, which are next to PetroChina’s fields, spokesman Huang Wensheng said by phone today. The site is over 1,000 kilometers away from the epicenter, Huang said.

The Tarim Basin is China’s fourth-largest oil-producing region, behind Bohai Bay, Songliao Basin and Ordos, said Che Changbo, a director at the department of geological exploration at the Ministry of Land and Resources.

The last major earthquake to shake Xinjiang took place in February 2003, when a 6.4 magnitude tremor struck 105 kilometers east of Kashi in the Tarim Basin, leaving at least 261 people dead, according to the USGS.

Today’s earthquake was the most powerful to hit China since June 2002, when a magnitude 7.3 temblor struck the country’s northeast, according to the USGS. Today’s Hotan quake measures 7.3 on the scale used by the China Seismological Bureau.