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China need own oil tanker fleet - experts
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-04-22 19:09
As China becomes a large oil importer, experts say building the country's own
oil tanker fleet to ensure oil security in the future is an urgent task.
The fleet should be capable of handling at least 50 percent of China's total
oil imports, Friday's Beijing-based Economic Information Daily quoted shipping
industry experts as saying
Based on this estimation, the oil tanker fleet should be able to handle 75
million tons of the oil imports by the year 2010. The figure would rise to more
than 130 million tons by 2020, the newspaper said.
Currently, the majority of China's oil tankers are on average six years older
than the oil tankers of other countries, the report said.
The oil tankers are small and each can carry less than 100,000 tons of oil,
compared with the 270,000-ton and 300,000-ton oil tankers commonly used in the
international market.
Meanwhile, China's two largest oil importers, the China Petro- Chemical Corp.
and the China National Petroleum Corp, do not have their own oil tankers. During
the past couple of years, the oil imports shipped by China's oil tankers made up
only 10 percent of the total, and 90 percent were shipped by leasing foreign oil
tankers.
Although the government has worked on building up strategic oil reserves, the
work to build a large tanker fleet has been overlooked, according to Yao Ping,
deputy general manager of the China Yangtze River Navigation Group.
He cites Japan and Republic of Korea (ROK) as an example, saying Japan has
large oil tankers with a total tonnage of 20 million tons, which can ship 80
percent of the oil imported by Japan.
The oil tankers of the ROK can carry a total of 6.6 million tons of oil,
accounting for 30 percent of the country's total oil imports.
China mainly imports oil from the Middle East, African, American and
Southeast Asian countries, said Li Peirong, director of the information
department of China National Offshore Oil Corp. This means that it will have to
hinge on sea transportation to import large quantities of oil in the future.
Building China's own oil tanker fleet will also help stabilize ocean oil
shipping prices, which rose steadily over the past few years, acknowledged Zhu
Ning, general manager of the Nanjing Yangtze River Oil Shipping Company.
According to the report, the China Ocean Shipping Companies Group, the China
National Offshore Oil Corp, and the China Yangtze River Navigation Group have
worked out policies concerning the construction of an oil tanker fleet. And the
government, nevertheless, still has no concrete measures to support the
development of the sector.
Starting in 1993, China became a net oil importer and its oil imports have
risen steadily. Last year, it imported 123 million tons of oil, while its annual
oil consumption stood at 280 million tons.
The International Energy Agency forecast that China will import 150 million
tons of oil in the year 2010, and the number will climb to 250 million by
2020.
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