China's largest oil group, state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), has signed an initial agreement to buy 9 million tonnes of oil a year from Russian group AO Yukos Oil, state media reported yesterday.
The contract, which will last for six or seven years, was signed on Tuesday in China by CNPC president Ma Fucai and Yukos senior vice president Alexander Temerko, sources close to the deal were quoted as saying by the China Daily.
The contract follows a deal signed in March last year between CNPC and Yukos, under which the Chinese oil group agreed to buy 5.4 million tonnes of crude oil to be shipped by rail between last year and 2006, the newspaper said.
The oil will be transported via the railway linking the Russian border town of Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli on the Chinese side.
The paper quoted an analyst as saying that the latest deal could be a sign of more problems surrounding a planned Sino-Russian oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Daqing oilfield in northeast China.
"One of the signals we see behind the increased oil transportation by rail is that the oil pipeline project may be further delayed," said Li Fuchuan, a Russian oil expert with the China Academy of Social Sciences.
China imported 4.76 million tonnes of Russian oil last year, up 73 percent, most of which was delivered by rail.
China has been lobbying Russia to build an oil pipeline from Angarsk in eastern Siberia to Daqing, which is operated by CNPC's Hong Kong-listed unit PetroChina.
The pipeline would ship 635 million tonnes of oil from Russia to China over the next 25 years.
While a framework agreement was signed in March last year, Russia has still not made a final decision after Japan proposed a rival pipeline that would bypass China.
China's booming economy has resulted in a rapidly growing appetite for oil, with oil imports rising 31 percent last year to an all-time high of 82.5 million tonnes.
To reduce its heavy reliance on oil from the unstable Middle East, China has recently started importing more oil from Russia, South-east Asia and Africa.
Russian oil exports are expected to increase by 5 percent this year, Energy Minister Igor Yussufov was quoted as saying on Wednesday by financial news agency Prime-Tass.
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