PETROCHINA Co has estimated that crude oil output from its newly discovered oil field in north China could reach 10 million tons a year by 2010 - the equivalent of about 200,000 barrels a day.
The Jidong Nanpu oil field, announced last week by PetroChina, holds 1.02 billion tons of reserves and is believed to be among the world's biggest finds in a decade.
Company Vice President Jia Chengzao told a news conference on Monday that the massive resource could play a crucial role in safeguarding the energy supply of China, which imported a record 3.3 million barrels of crude a day in March and 47 percent of its oil needs last year.
The new discovery is in shallow waters in Jidong and Bohai Bay in Hebei Province, near Beijing and Tianjin. PetroChina may later build refining and petrochemical facilities close by, according to Oilnews, a publication by PetroChina parent China National Petroleum Corp.
The new find encompasses "proved reserves of original oil in place" of 405 million tons, "probable" reserves of 298 million tons and "possible" reserves of 202 million tons as well as "proved reserves of original natural gas in place" of 112 million tons of oil equivalent, PetroChina said.
The estimates released by Hong Kong- and New York-listed PetroChina still await a formal assessment by Chinese government organizations and are also subject to the more- stringent United States Securities and Exchange Commission reserve classification criteria.
A report by the CLSA Ltd brokerage firm said that, even discounting PetroChina's estimate by as much as 50 percent, the single discovery alone could boost the oil giant's net asset value by 15 percent based on an oil price of US$50 a barrel.
With new technologies, the discovery cost for each barrel of oil in Jidong Nanpu is 59 US cents, compared with a domestic average of US$3.50 a barrel, Oilnews quoted Hu Ruiwen, a PetroChina vice president, as saying.
The cost to develop a one-million-ton-a-year oil well in Jidong Nanpu will be reduced to between 2.3 billion yuan (US$299 million) and 2.5 billion yuan, against a cost of between 3.2 billion yuan and 3.5 billion yuan for a well of the same scale in onshore China, Hu said.
Source:佚名