Hu's Africa trip aimed at ensuring energy supplies

The visit by China's president to Africa, greasing diplomatic wheels to find foreign energy for his red-hot economy, is also aimed at bolstering the security of energy supplies, observers say.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) arranged stops in Egypt, Gabon and Algeria to follow his state visit to France last week. Oil and gas appeared high on the agenda of the trip, his third abroad since taking office last March.

With Chinese oil demand last year surging ahead at a record pace and domestic production poised to remain relatively flat, China depends increasingly on imports, noted Jeffery Logan, an economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The voracious Chinese economy was responsible for a third of the world's growth in oil demand last year, and overtook Japan for the first time as the number two guzzler, after the US.

To meet soaring Chinese demand, oil imports shot up 30 percent, about half from the Middle East and the rest from all over the globe, including Africa, Southeast Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan and South America.

Energy shortages in China in the latter part of last year were a "great concern because of China's increasing import dependency and the dependency on regions that are periodically somewhat unstable," said demand analyst Antoine Halff at the IEA.

"There's been an effort [by China] over the last few years to diversify sources of crude supply away from the exclusive reliance on the Middle East", while Saudi Arabia's share of the region's exports to China has been increasing constantly, Halff said.

Supply security was a key issue, experts agreed.

"It's very important," said Manouchehr Takin, a senior ana-lyst at the London-based Center for Global Energy Studies (CGES).

"It is not political security, it is the need to import," he said.

"Chinese authorities have tremendous concern about the security of their oil supplies," agreed Logan

In general, viewed from abroad China's ambitions lack transparency. But China itself, transitioning from a state-controlled to a market economy, is fairly inexperienced in how business is conducted, he said.

"There's a lot of potential for misunderstanding," he said.

To help guarantee energy supply, Beijing is also pushing state-owned oil firms to invest abroad. But it is paying very high prices for what others see as marginal investments in such countries as Sudan, Peru and Kazakhstan, he said.

Faced with oil shortfalls, Bei-jing will try to curtail growth in demand in the mainly state-controlled economy, Takin said.