How China Is Winning the Oil Race
    By Jon D. Markman
    TheStreet.com

    Thursday 27 April 2006

    Is America too ethical to have cheap gasoline?

    That is the inescapable question presented to US investors and policy makers as pump prices soar after a state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

    The US is the world's greatest consumer of energy at present, but China is the world's fastest-growing consumer. That puts us in direct competition for any new sources of crude oil, natural gas, coal and uranium that materialize through exploration and discovery, not to mention any current sources that profit-seeking producers decide to put up for grabs.

    Increasingly, new energy sources that China is acquiring are in countries that Americans find distasteful. Many of them are in Africa, in countries with horrific human-rights records such as Sudan, Chad and the Republic of the Congo. And much of the energy is controlled by rapacious despots in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan and in Southeast Asia's Myanmar.

    Energy acquisition is a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. Any new energy that China obtains for its fast-growing economy is unavailable to us forever. So you just have to wonder whether the US's antipathy for dealing with the worst of the world's rogue states has led inexorably to $4-a-gallon gasoline this spring.

    The New Colonial Power

    Dan Zhou, chief analyst at CEB Monitor Group in Beijing, points out that China has emerged as an attractive partner in Africa and Central Asia in four ways. Its intensifying demand drives up prices for its products, which are largely raw materials such as oil, zinc and copper. It sets virtually no standards for political transparency or economic reform to get deals done. It ignores internal human-rights abuses as an impediment to deal-making. And it is a one-stop shop, offering not just investment, trade, skilled workers and military weapons but also diplomatic protection in the form of its United Nations Security Council veto.

    China's hunt for oil in Africa has made it essentially the new colonial superpower in the region, surpassing the memories of prior imperial forces such as Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Great Britain and France. And it has achieved that status in record time. Trade between China and Africa, which totaled $10 billion in 2000, soared to $39.7 billion in 2005. According to research by CEB Monitor, here is a guidebook of China's assets in the region:

• Sudan: China has a $4 billion investment in the country widely believed to have the largest untapped oil reserves in Africa. The China National Petroleum Corp. has a 40% stake in Greater Nile Petroleum, which owns oil fields, a pipeline, a large refinery and a port. Last year, China purchased more than half of Sudan's oil exports. Conversely, Sudan accounted for 6% of China's oil imports, about 200,000-plus barrels a day.
  
  
• Angola: Offshore wells have made this Africa's second-largest oil producer. Through February of this year, Angola accounted for 13% of all oil imports to China - making it the country's main supplier. China has committed at least $3 billion in loans to Angola for additional oil rights, and it has supplied engineers and trained workers to develop fields. China is now Angola's largest aid donor as well.
  
  
• Nigeria: This is Africa's largest oil producer, and until recently it has not been a major supplier to China. However, China's largest publicly held oil company, Cnooc, bought a 45% stake in a Nigerian oil-and-gas field for $2.27 billion last month and has also bought 35% of an exploration license in the Niger Delta for $60 million.
  
  
• Elsewhere in Africa: Cnooc has been active in Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Gabon, it has made investments of $170 million in the mines of Zambia, and it has become a major weapons supplier and trading partner of Zimbabwe, which is run with unbounded corruption by global outcast Robert Mugabe.

    A Less Meddlesome Buyer

    In Latin America, the story is much the same: China is increasingly becoming the partner of choice for repressive, paranoid or regionally ambitious regimes that want to buy guns and tanks with their oil and ore revenue.

    According to The Los Angeles Times, the Bush administration held talks with the Chinese to encourage them to curb their role in training and advising forces to the south of the US This is getting to be a problem, as the region - fabulously rich in metal, energy and agricultural resources - is increasingly run by ideologues willing to snub US interests and seek less meddlesome buyers.

    China is now Latin America's second-largest trading partner, surpassing Europe. From 2001 to 2006, exports from the region to China rose more than 500%. In 2004 alone, Hu signed letters of intent worth $100 billion over the next 10 years, according to published reports. Here are the key developments by country, according to CEB Monitor:

• Brazil: The largest South American country exports iron ore, soybeans, cotton, oil and sugar to China and jointly develops satellites and aerospace equipment. China has promised $10 billion in additional investment in the short term.
  
  
• Argentina: China has signed agreements offering $20 billion in investment over 10 years. Cnooc is developing an offshore oil field.
  
  
• Venezuela: This is the third most important source of foreign oil to the US, but political and social disputes have led strongman Hugo Chavez to seek alternative partners. He plans to double oil exports to China to 300,000 barrels a day, about a fifth of the 1.5 million barrels a day that are sent to the US. The Chinese are buying stakes in several oil fields, making their output unavailable to U.S. consumers.
  
  
• Ecuador: This country is a top-three producer of oil for the West Coast of the US. The Chinese just purchased one oil field and are in negotiations for more.

    Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Hu has found in Saudi Arabia another repressive regime that wishes to ease away from a highly dependent relationship with the US. He visited in January, and turned around and visited again this month on his way home from Washington, with weapons sales and technology transfer high on the discussion list. China gets an eighth of its oil imports from the Saudis, and trade has increased ninefold since 2000 to $14 billion.

    As you might expect, Iran is China's fastest-rising partner in the region. There have been unconfirmed reports that Hu has committed to spend $70 billion to $100 billion to develop a single large oil field in Iran, about a fifth of which involves a $20 billion order to purchase liquefied natural gas over the next 25 years. Zhou says that one Chinese company is expanding Tehran subways, another is building out the city's fiber-optic networks, and others are setting up auto and electronics factories. It probably won't be long before Iran becomes China's largest source of imported oil; this would put its economic and political interests directly in opposition to U.S. politicians and consumers.

    Neighbors: Theirs and Ours

    And finally we get to Central Asia republics, which formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, all nestled up against China's back door. They deliver almost 500,000 barrels of oil a day through pipelines and tankers. This has been a boon to the commissars of Kazakhstan, where gross domestic product has reached $56 billion due to the development of its robust energy fields by U.S., European and Russian explorers. The country shares a border with the gigantic Xinjian province of China and has developed fast-expanding bilateral trade, not just in oil and gas but also in cement and small manufactured goods.

    Of course, the Chinese have not left democratic countries' resources off its shopping list. A couple of years ago, it bought a large stake in the big Canadian miner Noranda, and it has dozens of supply relationships with individual Alberta and Saskatchewan oil, gas and coal producers. No rock is left unturned, so to speak; a venture capitalist in my Seattle office building has helped Chinese entrepreneurs acquire privately held coal, gold and silver mining interests throughout the western US.

    For stone-cold US investors, the obvious play here is to simply tag along by taking positions in foreign and domestic companies supplying the Chinese juggernaut, whether they are base metal producer Falconbridge in Canada; a producer of Turkish energy like Toreador Resources of Texas; a producer of Venezuelan oil and gas like Harvest Natural Resources; or the two big Chinese energy companies Cnooc or China Petroleum & Chemical.

    For consumers, outraged indignation is about the best you can do, along with new personal choices about limiting the use of fossil fuel. China has no incentive to bend to U.S. demands to force change on its repressive foreign energy partners. And our politicians are unlikely yet to ease up on rules preventing US companies from participating in the sort of bribery and weapons brokerage that has become de rigueur for doing business in the equatorial zone where most new energy sources are being discovered.

    So this really is just another case of joining 'em when you can't beat 'em. Shake your fist at the Chinese if you must, but also continue to buy global miners and drillers on dips in this bull market for commodities, sell your SUV, move closer to work, install solar energy panels and make peace with nuclear energy.

    Jon D. Markman is editor of the independent investment newsletter, The Daily Advantage, and writes a weekly column for CNBC on MSN Money that is republished on TheStreet.com.