Recently in China Category

The latest Platts' survey on Chinese demand, put together by our Hong Kong bureau chief Winnie Lee, is the most bullish change in the supply/demand balance that has appeared in several months.

With things such as the dollar and the (now-stalled) rise in the equities market given much of the credit for the increase in the price of oil in recent months, there wasn't a tremendous amount of data to support the idea that the market had undergone a fundamental change that would call for rising prices. But the reports out of China would constitute that sort of news.

For the last several months, Platts' Hong Kong correspondent Winnie Lee has been pulling together the disparate flow of data out of China to put together a single Chinese demand figure.

Up until about a year ago, that figure might have been the most significant one in the entire oil industry, as it was Chinese demand that was one key factor in propelling prices to their record levels of last July.

China claimed its latest engineering laurels this week, becoming only the second country in the world to have a working coal-to-oil program. Driven by a genuine and practical obsession with energy independence, China joined South Africa as the only two nations in the world with Coal to Liquids technology up, running and churning out transport fuels.

Here's one for US Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman: Take it from the Chinese and buy low when stocking your Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Wall Street and most of the European stock markets have plummeted as economic turmoil rippled through the Western world, and investors question whether bailout of the US financial sector will be enough to prevent a global recession. But business executives in China and India have been busy lining up the their next asset targets to buy, usually for billions of dollars apiece.

Airlines around the world posted a miserable set of financial results this week, and most inserted carefully-worded, creative language to explain to their shareholders why they are spending so much on jet fuel, and to prepare them for more fuel misery to come.

It's probably the most talked about topic in the past month about the Olympics. No... it's not the bird nest we are talking about, nor the athletes being suspended for allegedly taking performance enhancing drugs, nor the International Olympic Committee's decision to reverse its decision to suspend Iraq for alleged government interference in the country's national committee.

We are talking about Beijing's air quality and how everyone seems to have a view and making a statement about it.

Paul Ting is an independent analyst who had been one of the top Wall Street equity analysts. He focuses now on China, and his analysis of recent data and information from his sources in that country has led him to conclude that the country passed a significant demand mark last month.

According to Ting, Chinese demand passed 8 million b/d for the month, for the first time. Specifically, it rose to 8.43 million b/d, up from 7.919 million b/d the month before.

China shocked the world oil markets with its first price hike since November this week -- raising the possibility of a slow-down in Chinese demand growth for the first time this year. The timing of the news (ahead of the Olympics, not after) and the size of the increase (a relatively hefty 17% gain) were eye-popping. But in retrospect, was the news really worth all the fuss?

As this decade has passed, absent-minded, coffee-house chatter about blockading the sea routes that provide China with most of its imported crude oil seems to have died down. The paradox is that the "threat of blockade" seems to have receded, even as China's dependency on imports has shot through the roof.