biggest consumer of energy after the United States, and Japan is the third. Japan estimated natural gas reserves in the disputed area at as high as 200 billion cubic metres in a 1999 survey, the equivalent of around two and a half years of domestic consumption. But the gas may be difficult to extract and is located in a spot ill-suited for sale to the Japanese market, analysts said. For China, which consumes less than half the gas that Japan does, developers would have to compete with cheap coal for use in power stations. (Additional reporting by John Ruwitch and Guo Shipeng in Beijing)
