Shipments will start on Oct. 15 and will be carried out over the course of one year, KazTransGas said in a statement.

A gas pipeline completed in 2009 connects all Central Asian energy exporters - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan - to China. But Kazakhstan has until now exported gas only to Russia because additional pipelines were needed to link its fields to the Chinese one.

KazTransGas, which operates Kazakh gas pipelines and has no upstream assets, did not name the producers that would supply the gas but said some of it would come from the stocks in its storage.