Cnooc Group Steps Up Takeover of China’s Independent Refineries
China National Offshore Oil Corp., the nation’s third-largest oil company, said it is”actively pushing forward”the acquisition of independent refineries to expand into oil processing.
The company is “doing due diligence on several rather big privately owned processing plants in eastern China’s Shandong province,”Liu Junshan, the Beijing-based spokesman of China National Offshore, said by telephone today in Beijing, without naming the plants.
China National Offshore is buying so-called teapot refineries to diversify from oil exploration and tap the nation’s surging fuel demand. The privately held plants are mostly located in Shandong and Shaanxi province. The plants in Shandong have a combined annual processing capacity of about 45 million metric tons, about 30 percent of the refining volume at China Petrochemical Corp., the nation’s biggest oil refiner.
Teapot refineries were running their units at less than 50 percent of their total capacity last year because of rising raw material costs, Ke Xiaoming, vice director of the Marketing Department of the Economic and Technology Research Institute, a think-tank of China Petrochemical, said March 15.
The plants use mostly fuel oil as feedstock whose costs have risen in line with crude oil prices. Benchmark crude oil prices in New York have gained about 86 percent in the past year, reaching $111.80 a barrel yesterday, the highest since trading began in 1983.
China National Offshore’s first refinery in Guangdong province, the nation’s manufacturing hub, is expected to start processing crude into fuel products this year. The company is the parent of Hong Kong-listed Cnooc Ltd.
Tags: CNOOC
We would like the names of several Tea Pot Refineries and phone/email address. We are in the oil business in South Africa andn we would like to sell some oil-not crude oil- to these tea pot refineries.
thank you very much.
John Webster