As China vows to take an “iron fist” to combating air pollution, it’s conversion from coal to the clean-burning natural gas has proven to be happening abruptly, as seen in the supply crunch this past winter when people cranked up the heat, sending the country's gas consumption skyrocketing.

China’s solution to that is building more gas storage facilities, filling them up in the summer when consumption is low, then extracting the fuel during the winter heating season. More mature gas markets like Europe and the US have long relied on storage space to smooth out the seasonal demand swing.

The first successful injection of natural gas into underground storage space took place in Canada in 1915. The first such facility in China was built in the country’s north more than eight decades later. Now it has 25 storage sites.

China’s current storage capacity accounts for 3.3 percent of its annual demand, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, significantly lower than the world’s average of 10-12 percent.

“The supply shortage left us stumbling through the winter consumption peak,” says Sheng Yong, vice chief at Xiangguosi Gas Storage in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality. The site is one of the 23 storage facilities built by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The remaining two are built by another state-owned enterprise, Sinopec. Together they have the storage capacity of 7.7 billion cubic meters, according to figures provided by CNPC.

“Compared with the nation's huge demand, storage facilities are far from enough to hedge against shortage in supply,” Guo Jiaofeng, a researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the official Xinhua News Agency.

The government wants to more than quadruple China’s gas storage capacity by the end of next decade, with some scholars suspecting that even that growth rate won’t be able to keep pace with the country’s soaring demand.

While state planning agencies are urging companies to add more storage facilities, China’s regulated gas price has left little margin of profit for companies investing in new storage space.

Both CNPC and Sinopec officials have urged the government to offer tax breaks for the building of gas storage facilities to help avoid another gas crunch in the winter ahead.

(Video by Zhang Youze)