**China’s efforts to get energy supplies take a significant step forward with the inauguration of a new pipeline to deliver gas from Turkmenistan.**The leaders of Turkmenistan and China will attend the commissioning ceremony, as will those of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
The pipeline also crosses their countries.
A BBC correspondent in the region says the new pipeline breaks Russia’s long-standing stranglehold on gas supplies.
The BBC’s Rayhan Demytrie says the new connection will mark the beginning of a major diversification of Central Asia’s huge energy reserves towards the East.
Significant ceremony
Chinese President Hu Jintao and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev unveiled the Kazakh section of a 7,000km (4,300 miles) natural gas pipeline joining Central Asia to China in Astana on Saturday.
They pressed a symbolic button to open the 1,833km (1,139 mile) section.
The pipeline, which begins near a Turkmenistan gas field being developed by the China National Petroleum Corporation concludes in Xinjiang in western China.
It has an estimated capacity of 40bn cubic metres a year and will mean the central Asian countries are less dependent on Russia buying up their supplies.
This is Kazakhstan’s first export route that does not go through Russia. This segment cost $6.7bn (£4.12bn) and was completed within two years.
Most of the finance for the project came from the state-run China Development Bank.
The whole pipeline is expected to be finished by 2013.
Turkmenistan produces around 70 billion cubic metres of gas annually - almost the same amount that had until recently been purchased by Russia, Turkmenistan’s biggest client.
Supplies stalled following an accident in April on the main pipeline to Russia. So far the two countries have failed to agree new terms, causing Turkmenistan to lose around $1 bn a month.
Our correspondent says the incident prompted the Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to announce his country’s interest in developing alternative supply routes.
Turkmenistan is nearing the completion of another pipeline to Iran, and expressed an interest in supporting the EU-backed Nabucco project.