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China's Bohai Bay may hold 146 bil barrels oil reserves: report
Plats
Hong Kong
Petroleumworld.com 05 10 07
The Bohai Bay in northern China may hold oil reserves equivalent to 20
billion mt (146 billion barrels), with half of it still undiscovered, the
official China Daily reported Thursday, citing an upstream expert with the
Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The Bohai Bay rim is believed to have about 60 structures similar to the
newly found Jidong Nanpu oil field, the report cited CAE's Zhai Guangming as
saying. Zhai is also the first manager of the Jidong Oilfield Co. under
Chinese state-owned China National Petroleum Corp, according to the report.
The CAE professor, however, also noted that these undiscovered structures
would be more difficult to find.
CNPC's publicly-listed business arm PetroChina last Friday said its
discovery of the Jidong Nanpu oil field in the shallow waters of the Bohai Bay
has a total of four oil-bearing structures. It has confirmed geological
reserves of 1.02 billion mt (7.46 billion barrels) of oil equivalent,
including 905.6 million mt (6.62 billion barrels) of crude reserves and 140.1
billion cubic meters (4.95 Tcf) of gas.
PetroChina intends to start developing the Jidong Nanpu oilfield as
soon as possible. The first-phase of the project, to be finished by 2012, will
produce 10 million mt/year (200,274 b/d).
Output is expected to rise progressively to 25 million mt/year, making
the oilfield China's third largest after Daqing and Shengli.
Han Xuegong, professor with the CNPC Managers Training Institute in
Beijing, said news of a major oil discovery in the Bohai Bay rim had been
circulating within CNPC since last year. But the formal announcement of the
discovery was only made last week.
Han said he believed this was a signal that PetroChina might have also
come across other large hydrocarbon structures which the Chinese oil giant has
yet to announce, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Han added that based on a primary recovery rate of 40% for oil fields in
general, Jidong Nanpu's overall output would be about 408 million mt of oil
equivalent if no further discoveries are made in the acreage.
Using PetroChina's peak 25 million mt/year production goal for Jidong
Nanpu as a reference, the field would have a lifespan of about 20 years.
Platts 09 05 07
Copyright© 2007 Platts. All Rights Reserved.
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