China National Petroleum Corporation, the country’s state-run oil major, is looking for its first stake in the US, as the three largest Chinese oil companies together plan to spend $40 billion to access US crude riches.
The announcement came on Wednesday from Jiang Jiemin, the
chairman of china's biggest oil company during the National
People’s Congress in Beijing, Bloomberg reports. “We are
currently studying [investing in US oil], ” Jiang Jiemin
said.
Last month CNPC's domestic competitor China Petrochemical
Corporation agreed to buy a stake in an Oklahoma oil field from
Chesapeake Energy for $1.02 billion.
A trend is unfolding for Chinese oil companies to use government
loans to buy stakes in the US energy fields.
“Stake participation by Chinese companies in US oil fields
would be welcomed,” a London-based analyst for Global Energy
& Natural Resources at Eurasia Group, Will Pearson told
Bloomberg. “Full buyouts will continue to be scrutinized and
opposed.”
China already owns many entire oil and gas fields across Canada and
Latin America, Africa and Australia. However the US is not rushing
to sell off their fields, especially in the regions where military
or other technology can be accessed for fear of intellectual
property theft, Pearson said. In September 2012 President Obama
barred a Chinese-owned company from building wind farms near a US
Navy base in Oregon as a national security risk.
“The Chinese want to gain experience in shale gas, oil sands
and deep water so they can redeploy the best US practices and
technologies” back in China says Mirae Asset Securities Ltd.
analyst Gordon Kwan.
China has already invested a record $1.52 billion purchasing stakes
in oil and natural gas fields in the US this year, Bloomberg
reports. China National Petroleum alone plans to double overseas
production to 200 million tonnes a year by 2015.