Oil Weapon (original) (raw)

China's energy security: Perception and reality

Energy Policy, 2011

China, now the world's second-largest economy, is worried about energy security, which underpins the core objectives of Beijing and the political legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. The purpose of this study is to explore certain popular myths about China's energy security. The study consists of six parts. After the introduction, it formulates the obscure concept of ''energy security'' and attempts to contextualize it with ''Chinese characteristics.'' Then it explicitly points out that the largest driver of oil demand by China as the ''World's Factory'' is transport instead of industry. Next, it explores the effectiveness of transnational pipelines as a measure of energy security and explains why they are less effective than many observers have previously assumed. Furthermore, it investigates the global expansion of Chinese national oil companies and questions their actual contribution to energy security. A few concluding remarks then follow.

Energy Security in China: Beyond Traditional Approach

As the world's largest energy consumer today, China's economic growth has been largely driven by surging energy consumption. To examine the nexus of energy and China's national security becomes an urgent task for both scholars and policy makers in the country. Over the last decade, China has adopted an energy security approach emphasizing its external energy supply, which is quite similar to the Western approach. However, as the largest energy producer in the world, China only needs to import a small percentage of primary energy to meet the demand. Its energy mix is also in sharp contrast with that of Industrialized Western countries' (IWCs), especially when we realize that coal consumption constantly accounts for about 70 percent of China primary energy mix, and oil less than 20 percent. This is largely due to Chinese industrial sector's significant contribution to its GDP and its increasing demand for coal-based electric power, China's energy-economy nexus is therefore profoundly different with that of the IWCs at this stage. Therefore, it is argued that, over the last decade, both the Chinese scholars and policy makers have not developed and employed an energy security approach reflecting its actual energy vulnerabilities and to cope with the urgent energy security threats the country faces. For a developing economy like China, a broader energy security approach should be developed to guide the scholarly research and policy making in the future.

Transitions in China’s Oil Economy, 1990–2010

A team of specialists on China’s energy sector reviews a series of major transitions that have transformed that country’s oil economy over the past two decades. These include, on the demand side, (a) the increasing role of oil in the economy as a whole vis-à-vis other major energy carriers (as incomes have risen and millions of households have purchased vehicles and have also traveled by air), and (b) an increasing emphasis on energy efficiency and carbon mitigation. On the supply side, several additional transitions are discussed, namely (1) the scaling up of output from the central and western regions as well as from offshore, as the major northeastern oil fields decline after several decades of very heavy production, (2) a shift from being a major oil exporter to the world’s second-largest oil importer, (3) expansion and diversification in the number of sources from which China imports oil, (4) changes in the way imported oil enters the country (increasingly via pipelines from neighboring countries), and (5) with such heavy dependence on imports, the building of strategic petroleum reserves and an immensely enlarged refining capacity, intended to enhance the nation’s oil security.

Center for Strategic and International Studies

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Oil Import Diversification in Northeast Asia: A Comparison between China and Japan

In this article, we explore why oil import patterns differ between states with a view to understanding the relationship between agent-based explanations such as strategy and structural explanations—for example, geography. We compare degree of diversification between China and Japan in an effort to explore the relationship between agency and structure in the formation of energy security policy. The China-Japan comparison is contextualized with reference to the baseline case of the United States, a well-diversified importer. We employ the Shannon- Wiener index of diversity to assess the extent of oil import diversification, and temporal changes in diversification for China, Japan, and the United States. A key finding is that China’s statist approach has allowed it to diversify its sources of imported oil more quickly than Japan’s hybrid approach. In fact, since becoming a net oil importer in 1993, China’s sources of imported oil have diversified quite rapidly. Japan’s overreliance on the Middle East for much of its imported oil has been endemic since 1973.