Reuters: China expects oil production to slow down next year
Kyiv • UNN
China's oil production is expected to slow down next year, potentially increasing its dependence on imports. Production faces challenges from mature oil fields and the difficulty of developing new reserves.
Starting next year, China is expected to slow down its oil production, as companies will have to extract shale and ultra-deep reserves from old fields. This was reported by UNN with reference to Reuters .
Details
It is noted that China is the world's largest importer of crude oil. At the same time, according to the EI World Energy statistical review, Beijing was the sixth largest crude oil producer in the world last year.
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For next year, analysts and agencies are divided on the outlook, with forecasts ranging from a drop in production of as much as 31,000 bpd to an increase of up to 60,000 bpd, a slowdown that would likely increase China's dependence on imports.
Most of China's oil fields are in a mature phase, facing a natural decline in production, (while) a lack of significant new discoveries poses a challenge to sustaining long-term production growth at the current rate
The publication noted that after a 12% drop in production between 2015 and 2018, national oil companies Sinopec Corp, PetroChina and CNOOC Ltd invested in increasing production at existing fields and exploring new ones.
As a result, since 2018, domestic oil production has grown by an average of 2% per year.
Addendum
According to the National Energy Administration (NEA), China's production from offshore fields totaled 58 million metric tons in 2022, accounting for 60% of the country's total production growth.
In addition, China's annual shale oil production exceeded 3 million tons in 2022, almost four times more than in 2018.
At the same time, analysts are confident that due to the difficulty of exploring such wells, oil production in China is unlikely to maintain growth.
In particular, the consulting company predicts that domestic production will fall by 0.8% to 3.94 million barrels per day next year, with a slow decline in the following years.
At the same time , Rystad predicts a 1% increase from 2023 to 4.22 million barrels per day next year, although they are less optimistic about growth after 2024.
In addition, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects production to grow by 1.4% to 4.36 million barrels per day.
Analysts are convinced that Chinese companies are currently chasing "low-hanging fruit." In particular, PetroChina estimates that there are still about 7.3 billion barrels of oil in one region, but high costs mean that only a small portion of this oil is currently commercially viable.
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