CNOOC Extends China’s South America Reach

BP’s $7 billion sale at the end of last month of its 60% stake Pan American Energy to its partner Bridas which owns the other 40%, means CNOOC ends up with 50% of the oil and gas company that operates mainly in Argentina — and China takes another large step in the acquisition of energy interests in the region.

Since March, when CNOOC, China’s third-largest oil company, bought into Bridas for $3.1 billion, Bridas has been a 50-50 joint venture between the state-owned company and the Argentine owners of Bridas Corp., the well-connected Bulgheroni family who run a vertically integrated energy group that is the second-largest oil and gas producer in the country and have business connections to Central Asia.

BP may have been a forced seller, given its need to fill a war chest for any  obligations arising from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; CNOOC either got a fine price this time or overpaid for its stake last March.

In the short term, CNOOC’s investment, which represents China’s second largest overseas M&A deal of the year, may give it access to the local market but long term the focus will be on exports. The question is how that will fit with the Argentine government’s policy to favor the domestic market over exports.

Update: State Grid, the world’s largest power utility, is buying seven Brazilian power distributors in a $1 billion deal. It has also won a 30-year concession to operate the power distribution system in densely populated southeastern Brazil — further evidence that Chinese companies see good business in the growth prospects of South America’s largest economies.

China To Hold Growing Sway Over World Energy Industry

The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook (to 2035) says China’s demand for energy will rise by 75% between 2008 and 2035, accounting for 22% of the world’s energy consumption, up from 17% today. Put another way, China will account for 36% of the growth in the world’s energy demand (see snapshot of IEA graph below). The IEA’s projections are based on the assumption that governments will do no more than meet any commitments already given on energy conservation, greenhouse gas emission reductions and the phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies. (That so-called New Policies Scenario is the most conservative of the three sets of assumptions about governments’ intentions the IEA makes.)

It is hard to overstate the growing importance of China in global energy markets. [The IEA’s] preliminary data suggest that China overtook the United States in 2009 to become the world’s largest energy user, Strikingly, Chinese energy use was only half that of the United States in 2000….Prospects for further growth remain strong, given that China’s per-capital consumption level remains low, at only one-third of the OECD average.

The IEA also says that China’s growing need to import fossil fuels will have an increasingly large impact on international markets. It will account for half the net growth in global crude oil demand over the period, largely because it will need more fuel for cars and lorries. It will also have a voracious appetite for natural gas, the more so if coal use is restrained on environmental grounds. Its needs are likely to make the oil and gas producing nations of Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan which draw from the Caspian basin a significant new energy region. Similarly, Beijing’s push to develop new low-carbon energy technologies could help drive down the costs of those through economies of scale.

In China, energy demand triples between 2008 and 2035. Over the next 15 years, China is projected to add generating capacity equivalent to the current total installed capacity of the United States.

Electricity generation is likely to be at the forefront of the transition to low-carbon technologies. The greatest scope for increasing the use of renewable energy sources in absolute terms, the IEA says, lies in power generation. China is already a leader in wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) production as well as having become a leading supplier of the equipment thanks to strong government investment support. The IEA says China will add 335 gigawatts of wind generation capacity, 105 gigawatts of nuclear and 85 gigawatts of solar PV by 2035 (and put 8.5 million electric vehicles on its roads).  That said, coal-fired generation will remain substantial in China, with 600 gigawatts of new capacity exceeding the growth of the renewables and exceeding the current capacity of the U.S., E.U. and Japan.

The IEA takes aim at subsidies for fossil fuels, which it calls the “single most effective measure to cut energy demand”. It wants them phased out to end the market distortions that make it more difficult for low-carbon technologies to get development investment. It says that such subsidies amounted to $312 billion worldwide in 2009, though that was down from $558 billion the previous year. China was the fifth largest subsidizer in 2009, behind Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India, at just shy of $20 billion. About half of that went to electricity generated from fossil fuels and most of the rest equally to coal and oil. Beijing has been moving towards more market based pricing for energy, but as the figures show, there is still a ways to go.

The subsidies analysis was done at the behest to the G-20, whose leaders are meeting in Seoul shortly and where climate change and the successor to the expiring Kyoto protocol on climate change will be on the agenda. The IEA lays out how heavily the burden lies on China and the U.S. to cut back emissions if the ideal target of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 2°C is to be hit by 2035: 32% China, 18% the U.S. 50% rest of the world. Low-carbon technologies would need to account, the IEA reckons, for over three-quarters of global power generation by then and plug-in hybrids & electric vehicles for 39% of new sales. That day may not come, or at least not fully, but the era of cheap fossil fuels is over. China is already investing heavily in those areas and giving itself a first mover advantage that the rest of the world may find difficult to claw back.

CNPC and Sinopec Bidding Jointly For Petro-Tech Peruana?

Word reaches this Bystander of an unusual possible takeover bid by a Chinese firm, or rather pair of firms.

CNPC, parent of PetroChina, and Sinopec are bidding between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion for Petro-Tech Peruana, which holds eight licences for drilling in 5 million acres off the Peruvian coast, Reuters reports. Plenty of Chinese companies are buying up natural resources around the world, and, as we have noted before, they have plenty of the wherewithal to do so, but it is uncommon for them to mount joint bids.

That said, Sinopec is also working with China’s third big oil company, CNOOC, on acquiring fields in Angola. This may all point to increasing coordination between CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC to make sure they are not falling over each other as the world’s biggest oil and gas reserves get increasingly scarce and expensive to acquire, and oil and gas companies turn more to small- and medium sized fields, such as Peru’s

Petro-Tech Peruana made Peru’s first offshore oil discovery earlier this year and has also found natural gas. It may lack the resources to develop two fields that are estimated to hold 1.1 billion barrels of oil and up to 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas respectively. The company is a subsidiary of Offshore International Group, a privately held American oil and gas company based in Houston and owned by William M. Kalopp, who appears to split his time between Texas and Lima.

CNPC and Sinopec, if they do mount a bid, will likely find themselves in competition with Brazil’s Petrobras and Royal Dutch Shell. But they won’t find themselves without familiar neighbours. Steelmaker Shougang and the Zijin Mining Group already have operations in Peru.

And the bid, again if it happens, will be an interesting test of the current temperature of Sino-American relations as election season in the U.S. heats up. Will Chinese firms bidding for American-owned energy companies, even those owning assets far from the U.S., become a political cause celebre in the way CNOOC’s big for Unocal did in 2005?