The head of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) told an audience of energy industry executives in Houston he hoped to overcome “misunderstandings” about the purpose of recent acquisitions by Chinese oil companies.
A week after closing its £9.6billion takeover of Canada’s Nexen, including the UK’s giant Buzzard oil field, CNOOC chief executive Li Fanrong said China wanted primarily to increase its contribution to the supply side of the oil market.
In the west, suspicion about sales of major assets to Chinese companies remains because of Beijing’s controlling influence in the nation’s corporate sector as well as anti-China sentiment among some lawmakers. Canada approved the Nexen takeover even although some members of the governing Conservative Party had misgivings about it, while American approvals dragged on as legislators examined whether the deal would threaten US national security.
“We are supposedly doing this because we want to haul every barrel of oil back to China, or have other agendas rather than commercial reasons,” Mr Li said. He added: “Everyone with knowledge of the global market system can easily figure out that is not true, simply because this notion does not make any commercial sense.”
CNOOC, now the world’s largest dedicated exploration and production company by market capitalisation, has 40% of its proved reserves outside China after the Nexen deal, Mr Li said.
It was transformational for CNOOC and represented the “end of our beginning,” he added.
Buying Nexen gave the firm new offshore production in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and off western Africa, as well as producing properties in Canada’s Horn River shale.