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China's top oil and gas firm, PetroChina, is raising the capacity of its naphtha cracker being built in western China by 25 percent to 450,000 tonnes per year (tpy), company sources said Friday.

The 6-7 billion yuan (US$740-864 million) cracker, which will process naphtha into ethylene, building block of petrochemicals, is slated for completion by the end of 2006, in the western industrial city of Lanzhou.

The project will bring Lanzhou's total ethylene capacity to 700,000 tpy, which includes an existing 240,000-tpy cracker, making it the largest petrochemical complex in China's land-locked western regions.

“We wanted it bigger because it's more cost effective,” said the official familiar with the project being built at PetroChina's unit, Lanzhou Petrochemical Corp. The firm earlier planned to build a 360,000-tpy cracker.

The upgraded scale, however, is still below new crackers put on stream recently, or being planned in the country's booming eastern seaboard, as the economy in the far-flung western region is growing at a much slower pace.

The Lanzhou firm also runs a 200,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery, PetroChina's largest in the western region.

PetroChina, the country's second-largest petrochemical producer after Sinopec Corp., operates seven crackers with a total capacity of 1.85 million tpy, most of which are located in northeastern provinces.

Its next high-profile investment would be the 1 million-tpy cracker in the northwestern Xinjiang region, a project linked with a planned 200,000-bpd refinery to process crude piped from central Asian neighbor Khazakhstan.

The intergrated maga project will start production in 2007 for the refinery and 2008 for the cracker.