The main state-owned electric utility, the State Grid Corporation of China, is investing $2.3 billion over the next year to build high-voltage lines, according to People’s Daily, the main party newspaper. Xinjiang will export electricity to more populated parts of China and perhaps to Central Asia.

“Xinjiang is where all the growth in oil, gas and coal is going to be coming from,” said Lin Boqiang, an energy scholar at Xiamen University and adviser at PetroChina, China’s biggest oil producer. “Second, all the imported resources from Central Asia, oil and gas, go through Xinjiang and then get distributed from there.”

Xinjiang produced 25 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2012, and it aims to increase that to 44 billion cubic meters next year.

Pipelines already transport natural gas from Central Asia and Xinjiang to central and eastern China. A new pipeline from Western Siberia is expected to transport 30 billion cubic meters of gas per year through the Altai Mountains to central Xinjiang, where it would connect with domestic east-west pipelines.

Regional officials are also pushing for the creation of a new source of gas: processing coal to create synthetic gas, which could then be transported east.

A State Council energy plan released in June says Xinjiang will be one of four sites for pilot projects to convert coal to gas and gasoline. An experimental coal-to-gas plant is already operating in western Xinjiang, to the concern of environmentalists, who say the process emits a huge amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide.

At least 52 others across China are under construction or in the proposal stage, with nearly half in Xinjiang, according to a count in October by Greenpeace East Asia.