Courtship of Mideast Oil Raises U.S. Guard
OSAKA, Japan -- Explosive growth in China's energy needs in coming years will pit it in deepening strategic competition for the world's resources with current consuming giant, the United States, analysts said, reported by AFP.
Already the world's second biggest energy user, declining production at home will force China to import some 10 million barrels per day of oil by 2030 -- more than 8 percent of all world oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency.
And as it seeks to cope with a looming deficit in oil, China has piqued Washington's interest by nurturing ties with big Middle East producers Iraq, Iran and Libya -- all nations in which Washington bans investment by its own companies.
"China is going to be dramatically short in energy resources," said David Pietz, an expert in Chinese Energy at Washington State University. "Given the relative abundance in the Middle East it really is unavoidable that China will be forced to source ever greater amounts of its oil from there. That's obviously true of the United States as well."
State-owned China National Petroleum Company's move into a multibillion-dollar project to pipe oil from Sudan has underlined Beijing's determination to move in where ethical concerns make U.S. companies reluctant to tread.
"Sudan has a great deal of potential for exploration and while U.S. firms are handcuffed by human rights considerations, there's no real similar restraint on Chinese companies," said Rick Mueller of Energy Security Analysis in Boston.
China will also have to bring in some 30 percent of its gas imports from abroad by 2030 -- initially from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but increasingly from Russia and the former Soviet Union such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
Those are the very regions that the U.S. has been courting in its effort to buck a growing reliance on Middle East oil.
"These trends will make China a strategic buyer on world energy markets," the IEA said in its world energy outlook released at the International Energy forum of 60 producing and consuming nations in Osaka.
The United States recognised the looming rivalry for the world's energy resources in a report to congress earlier this year.
"Chinese leaders believe that the United States seeks to contain China and is therefore a major threat to its energy security," said the report by the U.S.-China security review commission.
China uses arms sales and its international diplomatic weight to make inroads to the Middle East, the report said. "China suspects that the United States seeks to dominate the (Persian Gulf) region in order to exercise control over the Persian Gulf's energy resources," it added.
It is a switch away from coal -- which currently takes up more than 70 percent of China's fuel needs -- combined with a relentless increase in demand for transport fuels that is driving China's energy revolution.
Energy demand is expected to grow nearly three percent a year on average to 2030, by which time China will eat up 20 percent of all world energy supply -- just less than the share the United States guzzles now, the IEA said.
China's role as a magnet for energy investment is just starting to take off too. The IEA estimating it will need a staggering $800 billion's worth of new power generating capacity as China's huge population switches on to electricity.
The resource rivalry is so far in its infancy, with China at the moment content to see the United States shoulder the burden of protecting world energy flows, analysts said.
"For now there's a relative meeting of minds.
China is dependent on oil coming through the Persian Gulf, and it's the United States that is going to guarantee them," said Pietz. "The same goes for the South China Sea area, where such a great amount of China's imported oil goes through."
tehrantimes.com |
