China National Petroleum Corp and Turkmenistan's State-owned energy major Natural Gas Konzern signed a cooperation agreement on Wednesday in Beijing to increase the amount of natural gas supplied to China, CNPC said on its website on Thursday.

Natural Gas Konzern will hike its gas supply to China via the Central Asia-China pipeline, CNPC said, without disclosing specific figures.

The move came after the China's biggest energy conglomerate said on Monday that China has received a total of more than 30 billion cubic meters of piped natural gas within 900 days from Turkmenistan, accounting for one fifth of China’s total consumption last year.

Of the 30 bcm, Natural Gas Konzern supplied 19.3 bcm, while the remaining 10.7 bcm came from the CNPC's Turkmenistan unit.

The Central Asia-China gas pipeline, the country's first cross-border pipeline, starts in Turkmenistan and runs via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before linking up with China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

China's apparent consumption of natural gas, which includes domestic production and imports but excludes exports, gas reached 129 bcm in 2011, up 20.6 percent from a year earlier. Gas made up 4.8 percent of the country’s primary energy use.

A recent report from the International Energy Agency forecast that China will more than double its consumption of natural gas over the next five years.

A quarter of new gas demand will come from China, another quarter from the Middle East and other Asian countries together, and a fifth from North America.

"China will become the third-largest gas importer behind Europe and Asia-Oceania, driving 2.7 percent average annual growth in global gas demand through 2017," the IEA said on Tuesday. It projected that a quarter of the world's new gas demand will come from China in the period.

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