China's government has issued guidelines aimed at creating fair and open access to the country's network of oil and gas pipelines, a circular made public Monday showed.

The National Energy Administration said in the circular that the guidelines will apply to crude, oil product and natural gas pipelines and associated trunk lines, as well as related infrastructure such as compression and storage facilities.

Oil and gas pipelines in China are purpose-built and operated by state-owned oil companies to serve dedicated upstream fields, downstream refineries or storage facilities.

The new policy will allow third-party access to pipelines controlled by these companies. This will ensure efficient use of existing infrastructure through utilization of any excess capacity, the NEA said.

The policy will apply to upstream oil and gas companies as well as downstream users, including city gas companies, refiners, oil and gas industrial users and other end users, the NEA said.

"Utility and operations of oil and gas pipeline networks should be mutually beneficial, and should aim to make efficient and full use of the facilities, while ensuring that existing users are protected," the agency said in the statement.

The NEA will oversee the new guideline. All agreements on third-party access between pipeline operators and end users have to be reported to the agency, which will also mediate in instances of disagreement.

Upstream users wishing to use the pipelines have to apply to pipeline owners and furnish them with current and future development and production plans, planned capacity usage and timeframes.

Downstream users wishing to access other parties' pipelines have to submit information about their own end users, sales reports and expected consumption volumes of their resources, the agency said.

In the oil sector, the new rules are unlikely to have any impact as most of the industry is still controlled by the state-owned companies, and oil is easily transported through other means such as road and rail, analysts said. BOOST TO UNCONVENTIONAL GAS

The guidelines are likely to have the most impact on China's unconventional gas sector, where a number of state-owned operators are involved in developing coalbed methane and shale gas but often lack access to infrastructure and pipelines, making commercialization of their reserves challenging and costly.

"This is mainly aimed at promoting development of unconventional gas resources," said Liu Gu, analyst at Guotai Junan Securities.

For example, many private companies currently involved in CBM development have to build their own pipelines or gas liquefaction plants to get their gas to market.

As the country's largest upstream producer which controls most of its conventional natural gas output, China National Petroleum Corp. owns the largest number of gas pipelines, including the country's two West-East pipelines that transport gas from western Xinjiang province to the east coast.

Liu said the volume of unconventional gas production in China is currently very small, so any financial returns from leasing the pipelines would be minimal.

However, another analyst in Hong Kong noted that while gas pipeline capacity in China is often fully utilized during peak winter demand periods, there can be significant idle capacity in summer, when gas demand falls.

Still, it remains to be seen how willing CNPC will be to lease its pipeline capacity to other parties, so "the complicated part is the implementation", the analyst said.

An official at an independent midstream gas distributor in China said it was still too early to tell if the new regulation would be materially beneficial to the company.

"We still have to wait to see how this will actually be implemented. It is possible that there might be some positives coming out of the new policy, if it helps us to serve our downstream customers better," he said. "But this is still only a proposal from the government, so it really depends how implementation will play out," the official added.

The company currently primarily uses its own network of gas pipelines to deliver residential and city gas to consumers.