Shanghai's mayor, Han Zheng, was pleased with the gas supply having reached optimum capacity and he hoped that most of the city's residents would be using natural gas by 2010.

"The West-East Pipeline Project will help the city to accomplish this aim," he said. Currently, there are 613,700 estimated users of natural gas. Furthermore, the city's demand for natural gas is expected to reach three billion cubic metres by 2005, with that figure expected to double by 2010 and triple by 2015.

For now, though, gas supply to Shanghai would be restricted to around 500,000 cubic metres per day. The first beneficiaries of the shipment were residents of the Jiading and Fengxian districts and the heavy industry companies like Shanghai Baosteel Group Corp and Shanghai General Motors.

Although, technically, the gas has reached Shanghai, it has only managed to reach the outer parts of the metropolis. A spokesperson from the Shanghai Natural Gas Pipeline Networks Co Ltd (the main distributor of the gas for Shanghai) explained that services will be expanded in the future.

"Residents in northern parts of the city and Songjiang District will be the next group of users," said Wang Yuchu, the general manager of the company, who added, "We will further endeavour to explore the market and attract more users."