The Chinese can hardly contain their glee over the recent discovery of Nanpu oil field in Bohai Bay. The find, they say-when slowing down long enough to talk-is the country’s largest in decades.
“Discovery of such a major oil field offers great flexibility and initiative for the country to plan and adjust its energy strategy,” said Hu Wenrui, vice-president of CNPC subsidiary PetroChina, which announced on May 3 a 1.02 billion-tonne reserve of oil equivalent on the Nanpu Block.
“The Bohai Bay is a relatively mature area and this new discovery is encouraging,” Mark McCafferty, the lead analyst for Southeast Asia at energy consultant Wood Mackenzie, told Reuters. “I’m sure it is a big find but exactly how big is uncertain as they tend to have a different methodology for reporting reserves in China.”
Don’t they indeed! One wonders if this find was orchestrated by the ministry of information instead of sober oil executives.
Just in time
According to reports in the official Shanghai Securities News, China’s newest “discovery” will boost the country’s crude oil reserves by 55% and its gas reserves by 9%. Most important, officials insist, the field will reduce China’s reliance on imports.
Well, for a while, anyway. If all 1.02 billion tonnes of oil equivalent in the field really do prove to be recoverable, that will cover about 3 years of national requirements since China consumed around 320 million tonnes of oil last year.
The discovery comes just in time, too, as the aging Daqing oil field in northeastern Heilongjiang province, China’s main domestic source of supply for 30 years, saw annual output drop below 50 million tonnes in 2003.
Things are really going to change as a result of the new find, officials trumpet. CNPC said it will start to develop the Nanpu oil field as soon as possible, with the first-phase project, to be finished by 2012, yielding 10 million tonnes/year.
More to come
PetroChina’s Hu said, “This year’s production target for the Jidong Nanpu oil field is 2.2 million tonnes, with substantial annual increase scheduled from this year on. By 2012, we expect the oil field to roll out 10 million tonnes of crude every year.”
After that, officials declared, output is expected to rise progressively to 25 million tonnes/year, making the new field China’s third largest after Daqing and Shengli.
And the party’s hardly over yet, according to other experts. “It’s possible for PetroChina to discover more oil at Bohai Bay, with new exploring technologies and theories to be adopted,” said Han Xuegong, a senior consultant with CNPC.
Not waiting to be left off the bandwagon, China’s top offshore oil and gas company, CNOOC Ltd., also is expecting “a cluster of quality oil and gas fields” to be discovered at Bohai Bay, which will become a “major driving force” for the firm’s future output.
Uh huh. Sure. Tell us another one.