The president of energy-rich Turkmenistan Friday pledged to significantly boost gas deliveries to China following talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
"Each year the future gas pipeline will deliver not 30 billion cubic meters, as before, but 40 billion cubic meters of gas," Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told journalists after the meeting with Hu.
Turkmenistan said last year that a 7,000-kilometer gas pipeline to China would be completed by 2009.
In recent years, energy-hungry China has faced growing competition from Russia and Europe for access to Central Asia's oil and gas reserves.