China Sells 90% Of Overseas Oil Locally

Interesting factoid from a Chinese article on the country's oil investments: 90% of the oil produced by overseas ventures is sold locally.In the article, an analyst explains some reasons for selling locally:

First, shipped back home, long distances, and transportation is not smooth, uneconomical and inefficient.

Second, the policy limits the countries in which the project. Some countries on the provisions of the proportion of domestic sales of petroleum, petroleum mined part must stay at home.

Third, infrastructure constraints, such as crude oil pipeline capacity issues.

Fourth, all shipped back, China's oil reserve capacity is also inadequate.

In addition, the expert noted that the reason is not brought back, but also because China's current refining technology to extract oil there are difficulties in some areas.

iFeng: 中国在OPEC有多少权益油：多来自非洲

China is looking to Africa for long-term energy investments, but it is also big in Latin America. He's a critical article looking at Ecuadorian investment: Why Is Ecuador Selling Its Economic and Environmental Future to China?

The blocks are periodically auctioned off as concessions to oil companies, and more and more of them are marked as a Chinese claim or interest. The Chinese extraction sites are remote, but anyone traversing the Amazon waterways, as I did this past summer, will routinely pass boatfuls of Chinese oil workers. At this point, China exercises a near monopoly on Ecuador’s oil—up to 90 percent this year alone—and is fast becoming the dominant player in mining and mineral extraction.

Of course, Ecuador is hardly alone in its growing dependence on Beijing. China committed almost $100 billion in loans to Latin America between 2005 and 2013—$15 billion last year alone, while the World Bank lent a mere $5.2 billion. But many believe that the erosion of sovereignty has been sharper in Ecuador than elsewhere in the region. The terms of its loans from Beijing are not fully transparent, giving rise to the worst suspicions. A March 2014 Amazon Watch report alleged that Petrochina has the contractual right to seize assets from any oil companies operating in Ecuador if the nation does not pay back China in full. A more extreme version of this claim is that the terms of loans include a “sovereignty immunity waiver,” that permits China to seize Ecuador’s own assets if it defaults. One of the administration’s chief critics, Acción Ecológica director Alexandra Almeida, told me that “the agreements with the Chinese are unlike any other. Even with Chevron we knew what we were getting. No one knows that much about the Chinese loans.”