China National Petroleum Corp., the country's biggest oil producer, said production from its oil and gas fields in Sichuan province has almost returned to the levels before last week's earthquake.

Gas output was 99 percent of the volume recorded before the May 12 temblor as of 5 p.m. yesterday, Beijing-based China National said in a statement on its Web site.

Listed unit PetroChina Co. has so far sent 83,300 metric tons of the 100,000 tons of emergency fuel supplies pledged for the quake-hit province, China National said in a separate Web site statement.

The death toll from the 7.9-magnitude earthquake, China's strongest in more than a half-century, rose to 34,073 people with 245,108 injured, the State Council said yesterday. In Sichuan province, the worst affected, more than 9,500 are still buried in collapsed buildings and 29,418 other people are missing, state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

The earthquake damaged power infrastructure and hampered coal transportation in China's southwest. China has dispatched 33,000 kilowatts of diesel generators to help boost electricity supply to the quake-hit areas, Gu Junyuan, chief engineer of the China Electricity Regulatory Commission, said in Beijing yesterday.