China's largest independently-developed liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage tank was put into use in Qingdao, east China’s Shandong Province on Thursday, which significantly increased the natural gas supply capacity in the North China region, according to CCTV news.

The 270,000-cubic-meter full-capacity storage tank has a diameter of 100.6 meters and a height of 55 meters, which means it can accommodate a C919 large passenger aircraft.

Wu Bin, general manager of Sinopec Qingdao, said that the development team raised the application of domestically produced equipment to 95 percent, making it the LNG storage tank with the highest degree of localization at present.

The storage tank has increased the annual handling capacity of the Qingdao LNG terminal to 11 million tons and the annual gas supply capacity to over 16.5 billion cubic meters, Wu said.

The Qingdao terminal as the only terminal in Shandong Province and one of the main gas sources in North China, supplies natural gas to provinces including Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Hebei, and Henan. Since its operation in November 2014, it has exported more than 44.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas.