It has persuaded a wary Bangladesh to agree, at least in principle, to a pipeline that would ship gas from Myanmar to India.

It said Chevron, Shell and Union Pacific have signed contracts to ship gas.

Williams now gets more than 60 percent of its income from shipping natural gas through its pipelines, a business where rates are limited by regulators.

News reports say that the riots have been over the construction of a pipeline to ship natural gas to the United States.

Gazprom has defended its strategies, saying that allowing private producers to ship gas independently would drive down the prices that are now filling Russia's coffers.

Mobil recently signed a deal to ship gas into eastern Germany.

The Mobil group plans to ship gas by 1997 in liquefied form by tanker to Japan and Korea.

The company says it hopes to ship gas from Usinsk in the future.

Belarus refused, and on 1 January 2004, Gazprom stopped shipping gas via the Northern lights pipeline.

If a pipeline is available to ship gas to a conventional customer, the gas price becomes too high for the Rentech process to be competitive.