BEIJING - China's
biggest oil firm, PetroChina, will invite foreign
oil majors to help the state-owned company explore
for oil and gas in as many as nine blocks in
northwestern China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous
Region.
The new blocks are mainly
distributed throughout the southwestern, central
and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, which has
proven reserves of 6 billion tons of oil and 8
trillion cubic meters of natural gas, the
Beijing-based company said in a statement on its
website.
The move marks the most
significant cooperation with foreign giants in oil
and gas exploration in the past 12 years, analysts
said.
More gas discoveries in the
northwestern region will increase
source supplies to the 3,800-kilometer natural-gas
pipeline, which extends from Xinjiang in the west
to coastal cities in the east, PetroChina said.
PetroChina will partner with foreign firms
through product-sharing contracts and "several
major international oil companies" have expressed
interest, the statement said, without elaborating
on which firms.
The Hong Kong-listed
company said it would enlist state-of-the-art
technology worldwide to tap the huge energy
potential in the northwestern region.
Yuan
Xinxiang, a PetroChina spokesman, told China Daily
the listed firm, instead of the parent company,
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), would handle
the nine new blocks in Xinjiang. But he declined
to disclose further exactly when the company would
start the tendering, although the company
statement said "in the short term".
Over
the past 20 years, PetroChina and parent firm CNPC
have teamed up with as many as 46 overseas oil
companies such as Total, ConocoPhillips and Shell
to work on 16 oil and gas projects in China. These
joint efforts have produced 22 million tons of oil
and 2.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas so
far, the Chinese oil firm said.
Covering
an area of 560,000 square kilometers, the Tarim
Basin represents one of the country's three big
basins with oil and gas resources exceeding 10
billion tons. With 16 years of exploration and
development, annual production in the northwestern
basin reaches more than 10 million tons of oil
equivalents, PetroChina said.
China has
vowed to step up exploration efforts across the
country to secure sufficient energy supplies to
fuel its fast-growing economy.
PetroChina's domestic rivals Sinopec and
China National Offshore Oil Corp both announced
big gas discoveries in China recently.
Sinopec, Asia's biggest oil refiner,
has said it aims to secure up to three medium-sized
or large natural-gas finds with reserves of 60
billion cubic meters in northeastern China by 2008,
after it made a major gas discovery in the region.
The Ministry of Land and Resources said on
its website a gas discovery in the northern part
of the South China Sea might hold more than 100
billion cubic meters of natural gas.
Xiao
Zongwei, a China National Offshore Oil spokesman,
said it was the same well sunk by Canada's Husky
Energy Inc and its reserve figures have yet to be
verified.
Husky, which is participating in
China's oil and gas exploration under a
product-sharing contract with China National
Offshore Oil, announced a major gas discovery in
June in the Liwan 3-1-1 field in the Zhujiangkou
basin, 250 kilometers south of Hong Kong.
A Dow Jones report last week said Shell
had submitted a development plan to PetroChina to
help secure production in the largest gas field in
Southwest China's Sichuan province with 58 billion
cubic meters of proven reserves.
Lim Haw
Kuang, chairman of Shell China, declined to
comment.
