China's biggest offshore oil producer CNOOC Ltd has taken a stake in a Canadian oil sands project expected to help expand the country's resource base for crude oil, the company said in a release seen yesterday.
The C$150 million (US$121 million) investment, made through CNOOC subsidiary CNOOC Belgium BVBA, gives the Chinese oil giant a 16.69 percent stake in Calgary-based MEG Energy Corp.
Privately-owned MEG owns a 100 percent working interest in oil sand leases on 13,300 hectares in Alberta, Canada. The holdings are estimated to hold 4 billion barrels of bitumen, a kind of tar, that can be processed to produce about 2 billion barrels of crude oil, CNOOC said.
Current high crude oil prices have prompted Chinese oil companies to consider alternative sources of oil to help meet surging demand.
"Lower operating costs and higher recoveries resulting from recent advances in technologies have made many similar projects economically viable," Yang Hua, CNOOC's chief financial officer, said in a statement.
CNOOC's chairman and chief executive officer, Fu Chengyu, said the skills learned in Alberta would be useful in exploiting oil sand and shale in China.
According to the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, China's two major onshore producers, China Petrochemical Corp and PetroChina are also negotiating purchases of oil sands assets in Alberta.
A signaling system malfunction disrupted high-speed rail (HSR) services beginning at 8am today, with trains temporarily reduced to three northbound and three southbound trains per hour as authorities conduct inspections. The malfunction occurred on a section of track in Miaoli County during pre-operation checks early this morning, forcing northbound and southbound trains to use a single track, the HSR operator said. The regular schedule has been replaced with three hourly trains offering only nonreserved seating in each direction, stopping at every station, it said, adding that business class cars would still have reserved seating. Departures from terminal stations are scheduled at the top
Taiwan is still in the process of assessing the possibility of recruiting workers from Eswatini, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday, adding that its goal is to help Eswatini upgrade its vocational training centers. If there are plans to recruit workers from Eswatini, safeguarding national security, protecting public health and ensuring the employment rights of Taiwanese would be prerequisites, Department of West Asian and African Affairs Director-General Yen Chia-liang (顏嘉良) told a news conference. Key considerations would also include filling labor shortages in specific industries, and fostering bilateral professional and technical exchanges, he said. Yen was asked about the progress of labor
VERBOSE VESSELS: A CGA cutter and a China Coast Guard exchanged verbal barbs for more than a day in Taiwanese-controlled waters before the Chinese vessel left The Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards had a standoff near the strategically located Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the north of the South China Sea, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The two sides engaged in intense radio exchanges over sovereignty claims during the 33-hour standoff. China Coast Guard vessel 3501 eventually left the restricted waters, 26.6 nautical miles (49.2km) west of the Pratas Islands, at 5pm yesterday, the CGA said. Lying approximately between southern Taiwan and Hong Kong, the Taiwan-controlled Pratas are seen by some security experts as vulnerable to Chinese attack due to their distance — more than
A US uncrewed surface vessel (USV) encountered multiple Chinese warships during an autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait, US defense company Seasats said in a statement on Wednesday. Seasats announced that a Lightfish USV had completed the first autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait. Over five days, the USV traversed the entire length of the Strait while constantly monitoring surface vessel traffic, the company said. The Lightfish encountered multiple Chinese warships, one of which was a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Type 056 corvette, it said. The Chinese vessels were operating “well within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone without transmitting their identity via the
RSS