Energy

China has imported four million tons of oil through the Kazakhstan-China pipeline in its first year of operation, according to customs data. The oil pipeline, extending 962 km from Atasu in Kazakhstan to the Alataw Pass in China, was completed in 2005 at a cost of 700 million US dollars. The first oil deal through the pipeline, which totaled 82,000 tons, was transported on July 11 last year.

China will impose duties on oil exported by foreign partners in offshore oil production joint ventures if contracts with Chinese partners are signed after August 1, according to the Ministry of Finance (MOF). Contracts already signed will be free from export duties until August 1, 2012, according to a circular jointly released by the MOF and the General Administration of Customs on Tuesday. The announcement is a new move by the Chinese government to curb exports of crude oil after the country imposed a five-percent export duty starting last November.

Russia will pipe 68 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China each year by 2020, Russian energy chief Viktor Khristenko said on Tuesday. "Russia will use two pipelines for the deliveries," Khristenko told a press briefing in Beijing, following his talks with Chinese officials on energy cooperation. The western pipeline, which connects Siberia with China's northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, will start delivering gas in 2011 while the eastern line, which traverses China's northeastern border with Russia, will be in operation by 2016, Khristenko said.

Though China's imports of crude oil rose 11.2 percent to 81.5 million tons in the first half of this year, the growth rate was lower by 4.4 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the latest statistics from the General Administration of Customs (GAC). The country also imported 18 million tons of refined oil, down 1 percent year-on-year.

Sinopec, Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil Corp. signed a $3.5-billion deal to expand a refinery in southern China, sealing what they called the country's largest oil project. The deal gives Exxon, the world's top oil firm, and Middle Eastern giant Aramco a foothold in China's insular 6.2 million barrel-a-day (bpd) refining sector, now dominated by state giants Sinopec and PetroChina. The agreement will triple the capacity of a refinery in Fujian province to 12 million tons per year (tpy)—the equivalent of 230,000 barrels per day—and add an 800,000-tpy ethylene cracker, the companies said in a statement. Several downstream facilities would be built as part of the deal, including a 650,000-tpy polyethylene plant, a 400,000-tpy polypropylene unit and a 1 million tpy aromatics plant.

PetroChina's subordinate Huabei Oilfield Company recently inked a cooperative contract with Shanxi Energy Industry Corporation for jointly developing coal gas in Shanxi Province, the top coal producer of China. The coal gas project, to be located at Qinshui Coalfield, is schemed to annually produce 240 million cubic meters of coal gas and 200,000 tons of liquefied coal gas. The whole project involves an investment amounting to 1.446 billion yuan, including 80 million US dollars in loans from the World Bank. It is the World Bank's first financing of China's coal gas field.

CNOOC Oil & Gas Development Company, a wholly-owned unit of CNOOC Group, has signed a contract with the local government of Taizhou City, Jiangsu province, for building a big bitumen project there. The project requiring total investment of five billion yuan will be kicked off this year, and its first phase is to be completed in two years. CNOOC's heavy bitumen 36-1 has become the most popular product among in the domestic bitumen industry.