The ill-fated fourth strand of the Central Asia-China gas pipeline has again been put on hold amid apparent sagging demand for the fuel from Beijing, Russian media outlets have reported, according to EurasiaNet.org.

A Tashkent-datelined RIA-Novosti news agency report on March 2 cited unidentified sources as saying China National Petroleum Corporation and state-owned oil and gas company Uzbekneftegaz have agreed on an indefinite postponement on work to the Uzbek section of the route.

The projected 1,000-kilometer Line D is designed to start in Turkmenistan, cross Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and end in western China, and will, if ever completed, boost the overall annual transportation capacity of the Central Asia-China pipeline network to 85 billion cubic meters.

This strand reportedly constituted a shorter but diplomatically far more complicated route than the already functioning Lines A, B and C, which also rise in Turkmenistan but cross only Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Plans were initially for construction work to begin in April-May 2016, but that was pushed back to December.  Officials were still singing an optimistic tune in January, when they were predicting that building would get underway in the second half of 2017, EurasiaNet.org reported.

In September 2014, Tajikistan held an official ceremony attended by Chinese premier Xi Jinping to mark the start of work on its section of the pipeline. Laborers on the phantom project say not a blind bit of work has been done since, however.

Recall, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on September 13, 2014, jointly attended the ceremony for the first-stage completion and the second-stage groundbreaking of the Dushanbe-2 combined heat and power (CHP) plant and the groundbreaking ceremony of the D-line of China-Central Asia Natural Gas Pipeline in Tajikistan. 

Meanwhile, RIA Novosti’s source said this latest delay to Line 4 was agreed on a mutual basis by Uzbek and Chinese parties and that no date has been set for the resumption of operations.  What is clear, however, is that spending for work on the pipeline has not been included in the state investment program for 2017 because of “unfinished work in preparation” and “operations at the joint venture,” according to the RIA Novosti report.