The symbolism is telling. China is ramping up energy production here, turning the northwestern Xinjiang region into a national hub for oil<\/a>, gas and coal, while the increasingly marginalized Uighur people are memorialized in what appears to be a bronze homage to a romantic past.<\/p>\n China is investing more than ever in the vast, resource-rich Xinjiang region with the aim of bolstering oil extraction and refining, coal production, power generation, and natural gas<\/a> production and transport. That is happening despite soaring ethnic violence. In deserts once traversed by Silk Road camel caravans<\/a>, sands are now crisscrossed with pipelines and high-voltage wires.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at how much they\u2019re drilling,\u201d said Lu Weidong, the team leader of a half-dozen technicians in hard hats and oil-stained red coveralls working one recent morning on oil pumps in the desert here. \u201cHundreds of pumps are being built, and there are hundreds more behind those hills that you can\u2019t see.\u201d<\/p>\n The foundation of Xinjiang\u2019s energy economy is oil. Xinjiang has an estimated 21 billion tons of oil reserves, a fifth of China\u2019s total, and major new deposits are still being found. This month, a state-owned oil company announced its greatest discovery of the year here, a deposit estimated to have more than one billion tons of oil on the northwestern edge of the Dzungarian Basin, not far from Karamay\u2019s fields. Xinjiang is expected to produce 35 million tons of crude oil by 2020, a 23 percent increase over 2012, according to the Ministry of Land Resources.<\/p>\n Xinjiang also has the country\u2019s largest coal reserves, an estimated 40 percent of the national total, and the largest natural gas reserves. Those three components form an energy hat trick that China is capitalizing on to power its cities and industries.<\/p>\n The region will be designated one of China\u2019s five \u201cenergy bases\u201d in the next five-year economic plan,<\/a> and its economy will be further bolstered by President Xi Jinping\u2019s vision of a \u201cNew Silk Road,\u201d<\/a> an ambitious plan to rebuild the ancient trade route into a 21st-century network of transportation and trade across Xinjiang, Central Asia and Europe.<\/p>\n Government money is flooding in. In May, Beijing said that 53 state-owned enterprises \u2014 from energy to construction to technology companies \u2014 were investing $300 billion in 685 projects in Xinjiang. The State Council, China\u2019s cabinet, announced in June that the Xinjiang government was investing $130 billion to build infrastructure such as roads, highways and railways.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Daily, the main party newspaper. Xinjiang will export electricity to more populated parts of China and perhaps to Central Asia.<\/p>\n “Xinjiang is where all the growth in oil, gas and coal is going to be coming from,\u201d said Lin Boqiang, an energy scholar at Xiamen University and adviser at PetroChina, China\u2019s biggest oil producer. \u201cSecond, all the imported resources from Central Asia, oil and gas, go through Xinjiang and then get distributed from there.\u201d<\/p>\n Xinjiang produced 25 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2012, and it aims to increase that to 44 billion cubic meters next year.<\/p>\n Pipelines already transport natural gas<\/a> from Central Asia and Xinjiang to central and eastern China. A new pipeline<\/a> from Western Siberia is expected to transport 30 billion cubic meters of gas per year through the Altai Mountains<\/a> to central Xinjiang, where it would connect with domestic east-west pipelines.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, who say the process emits a huge amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2014\/12\/21\/world\/KARAMAY-2\/KARAMAY-2-articleLarge.jpg\")
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