Japan, China Still Apart in Gas Talks, Machimura Says
Japan and China still have “some distance”to go before an agreement is reached on disputed gas- exploration rights in the East China Sea, the Japanese government’s top spokesman said today.
Chinese and Japanese officials have been discussing the dispute in the hope of having an agreement ready for when the president of China, Hu Jintao, visits Japan between May 6 and 10. Hu’s trip will be the first by a Chinese president in 10 years.
“Both sides vigorously negotiated in the hope of coming to a conclusion before President Hu’s visit,”Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura told reporters in Tokyo. “But there’s some distance to go before an agreement.”
Asia’s two biggest energy users are disputing the ownership of six fields that may have as much as 363.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 17.9 million barrels of oil. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda met Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in December to try to solve the dispute, part of 11 rounds of talks on the matter between the nations.
China says its territory extends to the edge of the continental shelf, close to the Japanese island of Okinawa. Japan says the border is halfway between the two countries’ coasts and has protested Chinese drilling between Okinawa and Shanghai, in an area which Japan says is 5 kilometers (3 miles) inside its territory.
The disputed fields contain a fraction of official Chinese estimates for unproven oil reserves for all of the East China Sea, which vary between 70 billion barrels and 160 billion barrels, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Web site. Overseas estimates are closer to 100 billion barrels.
Unproven natural gas reserves for the East China See were estimated at 7 trillion cubic feet by the Japanese in 1970, the Department of Energy’s Web site says. A 2005 Chinese survey showed reserves at between 175 trillion cubic feet and 210 trillion cubic feet, it said.
Tags: Energy, Gas, oil