BEIJING (Reuters) -Half of China's sales of heavy trucks could be electric vehicles by 2028, up from 10% in 2024, the chairman of battery maker CATL said on Sunday, according to a media report.

The comments by Zeng Yuqun, made at a heavy-truck battery-swapping launch and reported by the Shanghai government-affiliated news site Jiemian, suggest further headwinds for fuel demand in the trucking sector, already hit by the rise of LNG trucks in China.

CATL announced on Saturday it had put a 60 gigawatt-hour energy storage and EV battery manufacturing base into production in Shandong, its first such facility in northern China.

A second and third phase of the project will be added in the next two years, forming an energy industry battery cluster worth billions of yuan in the region, CATL posted on the WeChat social media app.

Shandong is aiming to build a 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) lithium battery industry by this year, encompassing electrode materials, electrolytes, battery cells and assembly, a local government notice last year showed.

($1 = 7.2090 Chinese yuan renminbi)