The battle for a share of China’s growing oil market is intensifying, with the output restraint deal by “Opec and friends” only helping to open doors for rival suppliers.
Last week, China National Petroleum Corp, the Asian country’s largest oil company, inaugurated a new corridor for oil trade when it commenced shipments on the China-Myanmar crude oil pipeline, which starts at Made Island oil terminal on Myanmar’s west coast and runs nearly 800 kilometres across the country to China’s western Yunnan province.
The pipeline serves several purposes, including providing an import option for seaborne crude from the Arabian Gulf, Africa and further afield that bypasses the Strait of Malacca, where instances of piracy have been on the rise and the vulnerability of which has long been an energy security concern for China. But it also serves as a way for China to facilitate more competition from suppliers. The first tanker to load at Made Island originated at the Turkish port of Ceyhan, which is the terminus for crude oil piped in from Baku in Azerbaijan, as well as from the Kurdish region of Iraq, running through Suez on its way to the Indian Ocean trade route.
The battle for China’s growing oil market – it surpassed the US last year as the largest importer of oil – has been under way for more than a decade, but it has now expanded to include competition from newly liberated US exporters, as well as those with cargoes from Latin America and western Africa to sell.
“The key to understanding the shifting trade flows is to be found in the arbitrage spreads,” said Eugene Lindell, a senior oil market analyst at JBC Energy consultants in Vienna.
“Opec’s decision to cut production has appreciated Dubai crude [prices] relative to other benchmarks, like dated Brent and [West Texas Intermediate], so that with freight rates still low it makes sense to arb more crude in from the Atlantic Basin, particularly as this is typically much sweeter and therefore easier to process than the Middle Eastern stuff,” he adds.
China’s oil market growth has picked up again in the early part of the year, hitting an all-time high in the first three months of the year of 12.2 million barrels per day as its recovering economy boosted demand for petrochemical feedstock and jet fuel, according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency. At the centre of the market share battle are China’s two main suppliers, Saudi Arabia and Russia, the latter having signed a series of major oil and gas supply deals with the Asian economic powerhouse over the past eight years.
Last year, Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia for the first time as China’s largest supplier, with its oil exports rising about 25 per cent to just over 1 million barrels per day, slightly ahead of kingdom’s export level. While Saudi Arabia has pursued its strategy of long-term contracts, Russia was able to capture a large share of the so-called teapot refiners, a fleet-of-foot independent sector that was allowed to flourish by laws liberating China’s domestic refining.
“The strategic side to it is that China is wary of depending on Middle Eastern crude for more than 50 per cent of its supplies,” said Mr Lindell. “There is quite simply a preference to cast the net far and wide when it comes to crude procurement.”
He said that “the corollary is that [Gulf producers] have been quite worried about security of demand … They have sought to counter this in many ways, for example by offering more flexible credit and/or delivery terms. There is even a trend towards jointly investing into refining projects, thereby ensuring that their crude is used as baseload crude for the new refining capacity.”
Thus Saudi Aramco has been in talks with PetroChina – CNPC’s main subsidiary – to take a stake in the refinery it is building to process 260,000 bpd of crude delivered by the new Myanmar pipeline to Yunann province.
amcauley@thenational.ae
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