The Beijing municipal government took the lead in lowering office temperatures yesterday in an effort to save heat, after reported shortages of energy this winter.

Mayor Wang Qishan called for people in all walks of life to cut back on heat use to save resources. A directive Wang issued calls for suspending natural gas supplies to some industrial enterprises, buses running on natural gas, large-scale boilers, the city's outskirts and some of the public sites to control energy use.

Stores, hotels and office buildings are also included.

A cold front has dominated the city for almost 20 days and posed a great challenge to the city's heating system.

Officials said that 88 percent of the natural gas supply in the city was being used for heating.

Meanwhile, some 230,000 newly registered natural gas users pushed the total gas-using household numbers to 3.8 million in 2004, according to Beijing Gas Company, a major gas supplier.

The overall consumption for natural gas reached 2.32 billion cubic meters last year.

Statistics show that daily gas consumption rose 47.6 percent from December 16 to 31, compared with the same period in 2003.

In peak consumption times, 10 million more cubic meters of gas are needed than during 2003.

The Shaanxi-Beijing pipeline is the major source for the city's natural gas supply.

However, the pipeline is overloaded, a source with China National Petroleum Corporation said.

The designed daily transit capacity has been expanded from the original 16.1 million cubic meters to 26.3 million cubic meters since December 2003, to better cater to the city's need.

Set up in 1997, the 1,098-kilometre-long pipeline supplied more than 6 billion cubic meters of gas to the capital by the end of 2003.

Beijing District Heating Group, a large energy consumer, has seen its gas supply cut off in the current emergency, but said it is little affected.

"As the city's huge 'boiler' that supplies heat to numerous families and offices, 90 percent of our energy comes from coal-fired boilers, not gas," said Liu Guanchun, with the group.

The group is responsible for supplying heat to more than 88 million square meters of space in Beijing, said Liu.

Although Beijing has witnessed an early warm winter in November and early December, two degrees higher than the average temperature in the previous years, several cold fronts in late December and early January sent the mercury on a rapid plunge, said Sun Yefu, a Beijing Meteorological Bureau researcher.

(China Daily January 12, 2005)