| Japan's Crude Oil Imports Rose 29% in June - Bloomberg
Japan's crude oil imports rose 29 percent in June from a year earlier after the nation's largest utility Tokyo Electric Power Co. restarted oil-fired power plants to replace lost nuclear capacity.
Japan's June crude oil imports rose to 19.6 million kiloliters, the Ministry of Finance said in Tokyo in its provisional trade balance report. By value, crude oil imports rose 26 percent to 393.4 billion yen ($3.31 billion), the ministry said.
Japan's imports of crude oil in January to June rose 14 percent to 128.2 million kiloliters. First-half oil imports rose 38 percent by value.
Imports of fuel oil used to fire power stations more than doubled by volume and value in June, when Japan imported 283,000 kiloliters of fuel oil worth 6.63 billion yen. Imports of liquefied natural gas rose a fifth by volume to 4.66 million metric tons and gained 33 percent by value to 136 billion yen.
Gasoline imports fell 7.3 percent to 2.39 million kiloliters. Imports of liquefied petroleum gas rose 16 percent to 1.16 million tons.
Monthly oil import statistics from the Ministry of Finance often differ from official figures announced by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry a few days later.
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China becomes a world-class oil buyer - Asahi Shimbun - Japan
China, with its economy growing too large for its shrinking domestic energy supplies, stands poised to become a major international oil buyer.
Until a decade ago, China could produce enough oil to meet its domestic needs. Now, however, it is more reliant on imports and in need of a strategy to secure a share of global supplies.
Declining oil production is becoming evident in Daqing, a city in Heilongjiang province that became a manufacturing center, thanks to its proximity to a major oil field.
In the 1960s and '70s, the city was often cited in China as a model for industrialization.
But the oil wells are drying up. Today, the pumps bring up mostly water, injected into the well to coax out the increasingly inaccessible oil.
Until last year, the Daqing oil field produced 50 million tons of oil a year, or the equivalent of one-third of China's annual domestic production. Production levels are expected to fall short of that level this year.
Another oil field in Shengli, Shandong province, has also passed its peak output.
An offshore oil field in the Bo Hai sea, meanwhile, remains largely undeveloped.
As a result, China has had to import more oil. Last year, it bought some 70 million tons of foreign oil.
The effects of this trend can been seen on Aoshan Island, one of the Zhoushan Islands off the coast of Shanghai. The small piece of land houses one of China's largest storage facilities for imported oil.
China National Chemicals Import & Export Corp., also known as Sinochem, loads the oil onto small and midsize tanker ships headed for refineries in various cities, including Shanghai.
The facility last year handled as much as 12.9 million tons of oil-more than twice the amount in 1998. This year's throughput is already 30 percent higher than that of last year.
``We'll be building more of these,'' said Sinochem employee Liu Yiping, pointing to the oil storage tanks.
The facility has been in operation since 1993, the same year China started to import more oil than it exported and Beijing stepped up its efforts to secure foreign drilling rights for state-owned oil corporations.
China is now developing foreign oil fields at some 30 locations, including the Middle East, Africa and South America.
China also obtained permission in 1997 from the former regime of Saddam Hussein to develop an oil field in southern Iraq, pending the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the country.
Observers say China, hoping to secure oil supplies in a postwar Iraq, distanced itself from France and Russia as the United States prepared its invasion.
``They (China) wanted to avoid offending the United States because they are looking out for their Middle East oil strategy,'' a Japanese diplomatic source said.
When the United States pressured Japan to stop its project to develop the Azadegan oil field in Iran because of Tehran's suspected nuclear ambitions, the international oil industry was abuzz with rumors that China was ready to step in and take Japan's place in the project.
Whatever the merit of the rumors, securing overseas oil supplies is a key policy of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who was inaugurated this spring.
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| Oil states to unlock doors for foreigners - Financial Times
In December 1975 Kuwait paid BP and Gulf $50m when it nationalised the Kuwait Oil Company the two foreign groups had formed more than 40 years earlier.
Since then the emirate's vast oil fields have remained largely exclusive to the national oil company but Tuesday saw the start of three new consortia which hope to win the right to return to Kuwait's northern oil fields.
It is just days after Saudi Arabia let foreign oil companies back into the country for the first time since the kingdom began to nationalise its industry in the 1970s. And Iran, which has not made investing in its borders easy, has also said it would seek international companies to help exploit a large new oil field.
All this has prompted oil executives, analysts and government officials to ask whether the possible opening of the oil industry in neighbouring Iraq finally jolted these fiercely protective petro-states into unlocking their doors.
Few are holding their breath, having endured 10 years of often-painful negotiations in Riyadh and Kuwait City. Nevertheless, there is a buzz of excitement that the oil industry stands at the very beginning of the next big chapter of its history - one in which the dramatic nationalisation of the main oil producing countries in the 1970s could at least partially be reversed.
Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize, a history of the oil industry, said it would be "the biggest turning point in the Middle East oil industry since the mid-1970s".
Amy Myers Jaffe, director of energy studies at Rice University's Baker Institute, said: "If one of them does it, all of them have to - but this is not a popular programme with the citizens of these countries."
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| Coup on Tiny African Islands Felt in Texas Oil Offices - New York Times
A coup this week in the West African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is reverberating in the corporate suites of the energy industry here, oil company executives said today. Officials from several companies said they were anxiously monitoring events on the potentially oil-rich archipelago, a former Portuguese colony on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea.
Exxon Mobil of Irving, Tex., the world's largest oil company, and Chrome Energy, a small Houston-based oil and gas company controlled by Nigerian investors, have secured options for oil exploration in the waters off São Tomé, an area just south of oil-rich Nigeria that geologists estimate could hold up to six billion barrels of reserves.
ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell and TotalFinaElf are among the other big oil companies that have shown interest in bidding for licenses to explore other areas in auctions scheduled for October. This interest has sent expectations soaring in São Tomé and Príncipe, ae two-island country of 1,000 square miles and 160,000 people where the main export crop is cocoa and the average annual income is $280.
"Oil has created dreams of grandeur for a tiny place that has been on the margins of global affairs for many years," said Gerhard Seibert, an authority on São Tomé at the Institute of Tropical Scientific Investigation in Lisbon. "The army and the political and business elites sense something coming and want a part of it."
American and European companies are not the only potential investors in São Tomé's nascent oil industry. Nigeria has a treaty with São Tomé establishing a joint development zone in waters off both countries, allowing 60 percent of the revenue from the area to go to Nigeria. And Sonangol, Angola's state-controlled oil company, has reached a preliminary agreement to train São Toméan oil officials and invest in future projects.
It remains to be seen how the coup leader, Maj. Fernando Pereira, will treat existing agreements. He agreed to talks today with representatives from the United States, the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries and Nigeria, in one of the first indications that tensions could ease.
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Water more prized than oil in coup-hit Sao Tome - Reuters
The women at the public wash basins in Sao Marcal would gladly trade all the oil in the Gulf of Guinea for running water in their towns on impoverished Sao Tome and Principe's coast.
They have little time for news of last week's coup on the tiny West African island nation, and even less for dreams of oil wealth -- dreams that some analysts say fuelled the bloodless military takeover.
"What do I think of the coup? I think I walk three hours every day to wash clothes and fill up all the buckets and bottles I can carry with water and then walk back home. The coup isn't going to change any of that," said Elisa, 23, a mother of two who says she was never given a surname.
Soldiers seized the country in a pre-dawn putsch last Wednesday, drawing condemnation from Africa and the United States, which sees West African crude as a way to reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern supplies.
For many of the 170,000 people on this potentially oil-rich archipelago, the coup is just a bulletin on the radio and little notice is given as the military junta and mediators struggle to bring a quick end to the takeover.
With an average annual income of $280 a year, less than $1 a day, the small former Portuguese colony is one of the poorest countries in the world.
Some hope that a potential oil boom could drag the islands from obscure poverty into the elite club of oil nations. But in hard-to-reach villages in the countryside, this seems like a pipe dream -- coup or no coup.
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| Oil Wars - Editorial - Washington Post
In recent days, Russian police have taken files and hard disks from the offices of Yukos, the second-largest Russian oil company, and arrested one of the company's chief executives. Raids have also been conducted in the offices of Sibneft, another oil company, which just happened to be negotiating a merger with Yukos.
Why Yukos? Why now? Whatever the legal explanation, it doesn't answer the question. Because of the way Russian business and tax laws are written, it is virtually impossible to run a large company without violating some of them. Because of the way capitalism has evolved in Russia, it is also virtually impossible to name a large company whose origins do not lie in the murky post-Soviet era, when state assets were transferred through a variety of semi-legal means into private hands. If Yukos is guilty, then so is everybody else.
The attack on Yukos is not, then, purely a legal matter, but a political one too. In Moscow, some believe it is connected to Yukos's stated support for politicians who oppose the president. Others proffer a more complicated explanation, involving a power struggle in the Kremlin between those who still support the idea that Russia should continue moving, however slowly, toward a liberal society and members of the old security services who want to turn back the clock (and may want Yukos's assets as well). Still others believe the affair is connected to rumors of a coming merger between Yukos and Exxon or Shell, a move that would create the world's largest oil company, bring substantial foreign capital -- and foreign influence -- into Russia and make Yukos's chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, both immensely rich and virtually untouchable.
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