Friday saw PetroChina Co., China's biggest listed oil firm by capacity, revealing a fall of 7.2% in its first-half net profit from a year earlier, the blame of which goes to lower oil prices and weaker energy demand.

The second half of the year will also see the world's oil market dealing with uncertainties, predicts the Beijing-based company. However, the company, while considering China's thirst for energy, said the top priority will be upstream exploration, particularly outside the country.

While addressing the press reporters at a conference call, President Zhou Jiping said he is optimistic about the prospects for the energy market in China, in the long run. He also specified that PetroChina expects to enhance its annual natural gas output to 130 billion cubic meters by 2015, in order to benefit from surging demand for clean energy.

Zhou said: "We see a huge potential in China's natural gas business. We've maintained a double digit growth rate in our natural gas output in recent years. We hope to maintain this high growth rate in the next few years."

He also expected China's annual demand for natural gas to reach 215 billion cubic meters by 2015, and to further hike to 239 billion cubic meters by 2020. He said that by
2015, natural gas will account for 50% of the company's total output.

Friday saw PetroChina specifying that the estimate of its net profit for the six months, ended June 30, was CNY50.50 billion (US$7.40 billion), which is lower than the CNY54.44 billion in the same period last year, due to a lower participation from its base upstream business.

The company's revenue plunged 25% to CNY415.28 billion from CNY551.34 billion.

A drop in operating profit in the firm's exploration and production businesses was seen to CNY37.64 billion, from CNY96.44 billion, because of the average selling price of its crude oil dropping more than half - to US$42.46 a barrel in the first half from US$93.45 a year earlier.

A 4.8% fall was noticed in PetroChina's crude oil output in the first half, to 417.7 million barrels. On the other hand, natural gas output of the company rose 10.6% to 1.201 trillion cubic feet.