Huge Chinese oil field may be bigger than thought
BEIJING - Latest explorations indicate that China's newly found Jidong Nanpu oil field in Bohai Bay may have more reserves than previously estimated, state media reported Thursday.
"The Jidong Nanpu oil field has huge and quality reserves of up to five million tonnes per square kilometre," PetroChina president Jiang Jiemin said on Wednesday, according to the China Daily.
"The one-billion-tonne (7.35-billion-barrel) reserve announced earlier is not the final figure. As our explorations deepen, we expect to discover more reserves."
Corroborating Jiang, Zhai Guangming, Jidong Oil field's first general manager, said that even half of Bohai Bay's resource has not been tapped.
Zhang Anping, spokesman of PetroChina, confirmed with AFP that more reserves are likely with further explorations and technological improvements.
"The Jidong oil field, of which the Nanpu block is a part, has been under exploration for decades," he said. "It is the current improvement in technologies that has enabled us to make the new discoveries."
China National Petroleum Corporation, PetroChina's parent company, had estimated that the Nanpu oil field could produce 10 million tonnes of crude every year by 2012.
The Jidong Nanpu oil field, the largest discovery in the country in the past four decades, is expected to help quench energy-hungry China's thirst for oil.
Last year, the country crude consumption rose 7.1 percent year-on-year to top 320 million tonnes, with as much as 45 percent of the total consumption imported from abroad, according to government data.
Chinese customs figure showed that in April crude imports hit a historic high of 14.8 million tonnes, up 23 percent from a year earlier.
In the first four months of the year, China has imported 54.5 million tonnes of crude, up 10.8 percent from the same period last year.
05/17/2007 04:13 GMT
