This week, construction of the northern section of the China-Russia East-Route natural gas pipeline was finalized in China's Jilin Province. The northern part of the project stretches from the city of Heihe in Heilongjiang Province to Changling County in Jilin Province, with a distance of 1,067 kilometers.

The project has set several records in China, including pipes with the largest diameter, the highest grade and compressive capacity of steel being used, and a hundred percent of the line section adopting fully automatic welding process.

The 3,371-kilometer-long Chinese section of the China-Russia East-Route natural gas pipeline starts in Heihe and terminates in Shanghai. Construction began in June 2015 and will be completed in 2020. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has also signed an agreement with Novatek, Russia's top independent gas producer, back in April this year to buy a 10 percent stake in its new liquefied natural gas project, Arctic LNG 2, to increase gas supply in the country.

Jiang Changliang, the general manager of CNPC pipeline company, told CGTN that Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei Province and China's northeast will benefit from the project environmentally in less than two months, since the northern section of the pipeline will start transloading Russia's natural gas starting December 1, right on time for northern China's heating season, when demand for clean energy is high.

The Russian part of the pipeline, which started construction on September 1, 2014, will link the Kovyktin and Chayandin gas fields in Siberia with the eastern port city of Vladivostok, covering a total distance of nearly 4,000 kilometers. Upon completion, the pipeline is expected to provide China with 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia annually.