{"id":10081,"date":"2004-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-01T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/power-hungry-china"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:09:21","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:09:21","slug":"power-hungry-china","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/power-hungry-china","title":{"rendered":"Power-Hungry China"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he Middle East, the oil baron of the world, is the region on everyone\u2019s mind today when it comes to energy policy. Too little attention, however, has been paid to power-hungry China, where economic expansion, a burgeoning car craze, population growth, and strained power generation have resulted in rolling blackouts across the country and unleashed a newfound hunger for energy supplies, especially oil.<\/p>\n

At present, the vast majority of China\u2019s energy supply comes from coal. Mushrooming mining towns, a specter from early American history, are springing up across China\u2019s landscape with a vengeance. In 1949, China had just over 300 developed mines. By 2002, the government counted 489 large mines, 1,025 medium mines, and over 140,000 small mines under development. China has cherry-picked from the pool of modern drilling technology in the hopes of producing an energy boom.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past 50-odd years, China has made great progress in its use of geophysical exploration, geo-chemical exploration, remote sensing, drilling and tunneling technologies, laboratory test and computer technology for mineral resource prospecting,\u201d the Chinese government said in a report released in December 2003. \u201cIt has raised the scientific and technological level of its mineral resources exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n

While China would like to depend \u201cmainly on the exploitation of its own mineral resources\u201d to meet the needs of its \u201cmodernization program,\u201d according to the Information Office of the State Council, there remains \u201ca fairly large gap\u201d between the country\u2019s energy demands and its domestic supplies of oil, natural gas, coal, clean coal, and coalbed methane.<\/p>\n

Twenty-two of China\u2019s 29 provinces and regions were hit by blackouts in 2003, ten more than the previous year. \u201cLast year, Chinese power use rose 15 percent to a record 1.908 trillion kilowatt-hours as the economy grew at its fastest pace in six years,\u201d according to the International Herald Tribune<\/em>. In February 2004, the Chinese government announced it would invest roughly $24 billion in new power plants that would generate three times the electricity used by New York City. \u201cI don\u2019t know of another country besides China that\u2019s adding more generating capacity in a single year,\u201d said Hao Weiping, an official at the National Development Reform Commission.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s oil industry is also producing at record levels. According to an account published in Fortune<\/em> magazine in February, \u201cDaqing, China\u2019s largest oilfield, is a sprawling state-run colossus: 90,000 workers tending 50,000 wells linked by a maze of pipelines and storage tanks across an 800-square-mile expanse in the northeastern corner of the country. In the city of Daqing itself, hundreds of rusting pumps bob methodically \u2014 beside government office buildings, behind restaurants and karaoke bars, and in the midst of dingy housing blocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to a booming oil industry, China is now the world\u2019s fifth-largest producer of crude oil. But growing production still isn\u2019t enough to keep up with growing demand. China is set to become the second-largest consumer of oil in 2004, behind only the United States. Last year, China consumed an average of 5.46 million barrels of oil per day, forcing the country to import $16.5 billion worth of refined oil products \u2014 roughly a 30 percent increase over the previous year.<\/p>\n

Late in 2003 the government also announced plans to develop four \u201cstrategic oil reserve\u201d sites capable of holding 75 days worth of oil, mirroring the U.S. underground reserves stored in salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n

At present, roughly four-fifths of China\u2019s oil imports come from the Middle East \u2014 a fact that worries American lawmakers and Chinese officials alike, albeit for very different reasons. \u201cBy 2015…three-quarters of the Gulf\u2019s oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China,\u201d said Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat (quoting Mother Jones<\/em>). \u201cChina\u2019s growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the real fights of the future may involve the search for expanded oil resources outside the Middle East. China knows it needs to reach into its own territories, out into the seas, and out to neighbors in the hopes of scoring more of the world\u2019s precious oil from less volatile areas of the world. \u201cChina, the United States, Japan, Europe and, increasingly, India \u2014 all growing leery of dependence on the volatile Middle East \u2014 are elbowing each other in a rush to nontraditional oil sources in West Africa, the Caspian Sea, Russia, South America and elsewhere,\u201d according to the Associated Press. The dueling aims of the United States and China may have placed the two countries on a collision course over oil supplies, with implications far beyond the energy sector.<\/p>\n

\u201cInterestingly, the three African countries visited by President Hu Jintao in late January and early February \u2014 Egypt, Gabon and Algeria \u2014 are all oil-exporting states,\u201d according to the Singapore Business Times<\/em>. \u201cThe trip\u2019s main purpose was to secure oil sources and to build up energy relationships with those countries.\u201d China has signed agreements with France\u2019s Total Gabon oil company to ship Gabonese oil to China, and China has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in refineries in Algeria in the past year.<\/p>\n

The race for international energy supplies will create a new series of energy alliances and new twists on existing ones. What this means for geopolitics and American interests in the years ahead is an open question \u2014 one of great strategic, economic, and ethical significance. As the Singapore Business Times<\/em> recently observed: \u201cThe Chinese realize that they are late arrivals while the U.S. already has secured its sources of oil, primarily in Saudi Arabia. China therefore feels that it has to compete aggressively with the U.S. and Europe, and is willing to take the oil wherever it can be found. While Western countries are sensitive to dealing with governments suspected of proliferation or of human rights violations, the Chinese are not deterred by such inhibitions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Middle East, the oil baron of the world, is the region on everyone\u2019s mind today when it comes to energy policy. Too little attention, however, has been paid to power-hungry China, where economic expansion, a burgeoning car craze, population growth, and strained power generation have resulted in rolling blackouts across the country and unleashed a newfound hunger for energy supplies, especially oil. At present, the vast majority of China\u2019s energy supply comes from coal. Mushrooming mining towns, a specter from early American history, are springing up across China\u2019s landscape with a vengeance. In 1949, China had just over 300…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[4647],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[4997,5022],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10081"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10081"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}