The leaders of China and Kazakhstan agreed to finance and build a network of pipelines to supply the world's fastest-growing major economy with oil and gas from the Caspian Sea region...

Kazakhstan's Atasu-Alashankou oil route will be extended and a gas link from Turkmenistan to China through Kazakhstan will be built, Nazarbayev said. The gas link will bypass Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, landlocked countries between Turkmenistan's Caspian shore and China.

Despite longer length and construction time and additional costs in excess of a billion dollars, a pipeline going through fewer, and more stable and friendly states, can be an asset more than worth the extra trouble.

China, the world's second-largest energy user, is scouring the globe in search of energy supplies for its economy, which is expanding at an annual rate of 11.9 percent, the fastest pace in more than a dozen years... 

The gas pipeline will be able to move 30 billion cubic meters of fuel a year and cost as much as $4 billion to build, Energy Minister Baktykozha Izmukhambetov said in November.

Chinese Investment

The [1,200-mile] extension of the Atasu- Alashankou oil pipeline will connect China with two oil fields ... The pipeline will have a capacity of 400,000 barrels a day, or about 5 percent of China's consumption.

China National Petroleum Corp., the biggest Chinese oil producer, said yesterday it will expand oil and gas co-operation with Kazakhstan after spending more than $6.5 billion so far on oil exploration, refining and pipelines in the country.

It's worth mentioning that pipeline projects of this sort with terminals so close to the Persian Gulf states could one day easily begin pumping oil and gas to China via existing overland lines.  The Iranian border is less than 100 miles from some of those Turkmeni gas terminals, and Iranian lines could be connected to those in Iraq, and even Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. 

This could present a significant advantage for the Chinese over the Europeans and Americans who would still have to tanker Gulf oil across the seas.  The financial potential of such additional lines are enormous, but of course so is the potential for conflict.  In the alternative, or perhaps additionally, China will likely try to get it's Mideast oil and gas from a pipeline going through Myanmar.