The Chinese companies are replacing Western oil and gas majors who left Iraq in search of greener pastures. CNPC took over the West Qurna 1 field last year and plans to boost its capacity to 1.2 million barrels daily by 2035. West Qurna 1 is one of the largest oil fields in the world, with reserves estimated at more than 20 billion barrels of recoverable hydrocarbons. Currently, it produces around 550,000 barrels daily.
The supply restrictions have meanwhile inflated the prices of the critical minerals, the report also said. According to defense industry traders, some of these now cost five times as much as they used to, and in at least one case, a critical mineral cost 60 times as much as it used to before Beijing started to restrict supply.
“CNOOC Ltd. has adopted an innovative combined development approach of ‘conventional water injection + steam huff and puff + steam flooding’, providing strong technical support for the efficient utilization of oil reserves”, it added. “The project’s platform integrates both conventional cold production and thermal recovery systems, and is equipped with over 240 sets of key equipment.
This is taking place ahead of the next round of trade talks between the two countries, to take place in Sweden next week. U.S. Treasury Secretary described current relations as being “in a good place.” Chinese officials, for their part, have signaled a readiness on the part of the country’s government to reach a mutually beneficial deal. An official statement said that the Chinese side hoped for an atmosphere of “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation,” at the talks.
China’s LNG imports have been trending lower since early this year, with purchases of U.S. LNG suspended entirely amid the tariff spat that President Trump initiated as a means of fixing the United States’ trade deficit with most trade partners. Besides that, a milder winter, weak industrial demand, and higher gas pipeline imports are set to result in the first decline in China’s LNG imports since 2022, according to analysts.
LNG imports into China, the world’s top buyer of the super-chilled fuel, continue to be weaker than the prior-year month for the eighth consecutive month in June, according to ship-tracking data from Kpler cited by Bloomberg.
China is on track to import about 5 million tons of LNG this month, per Kpler’s data. This volume, if confirmed, would be a 12% decline compared to June last year.
While China hasn’t officially purchased Iranian barrels since June 2022, third-party data providers and traders signal flows have been resilient despite broad US sanctions. That’s because the Chinese have built a supply chain outside of western control, which includes dark fleet ships and yuan-denominated payments, supporting imports of more than 1 million barrels a day.
Now, these concerns appear to have taken the back seat in the face of a fresh dose of Middle Eastern instability and energy supply uncertainty—especially in gas. Almost a third of China’s gas imports come as LNG from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the WSJ noted in its report, citing Rystad Energy figures. Russia, in turn, is China’s third-largest supplier of LNG, after Australia and Qatar. But it is China’s biggest pipeline supplier, via the Power of Siberia 1, with flows this year set to reach 38 billion cu m, according to S&P Global.
Record-high domestic coal production and weaker coal-fired power generation in China have resulted in declining demand for thermal coal imports into the world’s biggest coal market, with the trend emerging earlier this year, after imports topped 500 million tons in 2024. The Chinese state central planner, meanwhile, has mandated a 10% increase in coal stockpiles for power generators.
In the last 25 years, China has gone from providing less than 2 percent of Latin America’s exports to being the second largest trade partner for the region and the single biggest trade partner of South America. This skyrocketing trade relation comes on the back of China’s ambitious Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative, and gives Beijing enormous influence in critical emerging markets.