The Politics of Energy-Democracy: The World Around Us Sun, 5 Jun 2005 04:54:42 -0700- This FBC Posting contains: 1). Hunger for Energy Transforms How India Operates, The New York Times 2). Revealed: the new scramble for Africa, The Guardian, UK 3). Japan and China Battle for Russia's Oil and Gas 4). Tokyo Casts Pipeline Financing in Doubt, The Moscow Times 5). Country Profile, China: US Department of Energy 6). Measures of Petroleum Dependence and Vulnerability in OECD Countries, The Middle East Economic Survey http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/international/asia/05india.html?pagewanted=print June 5, 2005 Hunger for Energy Transforms How India Operates By SOMINI SENGUPTA, The New York Times NEW DELHI, June 1 - Fed by a decade-long economic boom, India's ever-growing appetite for energy is quietly reshaping the way it operates in the world, changing relations with its neighbors, extending its reach to oil states as far flung as Sudan and Venezuela, and overcoming Washington's resistance to its nuclear ambitions. Hovering over India's energy quest is its biggest competitor: China, which is also scouring the globe to line up new energy sources. The combined appetite of the two Asian giants is raising oil prices and putting greater demands on world oil supplies. Already India's energy ambitions have led to developments unthinkable just a couple of years ago: a proposed pipeline to ferry natural gas from Iran across Pakistan; a new friendship with the military government in gas-rich Myanmar, formerly Burma; and budding talks with the United States to let India buy nuclear technology. Nuclear power is expected to top the agenda when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Washington to meet with President Bush in July. While India covets new equipment to strengthen its feeble nuclear energy program, the United States has prohibited the sale of nuclear technology to India since it tested a nuclear bomb in 1998. "International cooperation, international understanding of India's nuclear ambition," Mr. Singh told foreign journalists on Monday, in an allusion to what New Delhi wants from the United States, "can help to ensure our nuclear energy program moves forward at a faster pace." To understand India's dire need for energy, consider the fate of its commercial capital, Mumbai, formerly Bombay. It was enveloped in darkness in May because of a severe power shortage. These days, the prime minister is engaged in a politically explosive argument with left-wing parties after suggesting that the government curtail giving free electricity to farmers. As the world's fifth-largest consumer of energy, India used energy at the equivalent of 538 million tons of oil daily in 2002, the most recent year for which figures were available from the International Energy Agency. That demand is expected to nearly double by 2030. Today, India imports about 70 percent of its oil; in another 20 years, the Indian government estimates, that will rise to an ominous 85 percent. India's demand for natural gas is also expected to grow, and most of it would have to be imported. "Our dependence is rising," Mani Shankar Aiyar, India's petroleum minister, said during a recent interview in his office. "I welcome that, because it reflects India moving on." Indeed, it is. "Mutual dependencies" is the buzzword of the day, signaling the way oil and gas links among South Asian countries stand to rewrite the enmities of the past. "The foreign policy of India will have a lot to do with energy," said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "That is a new imagination and one likely to stay." That vision is not without its challenges. On the one hand, India seeks to cast itself as the model of democratic pluralism, as in its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. On the other, its hunt for fuel is pushing it to reach out to authoritarian governments like those of Sudan and Myanmar, which the United States has sought to isolate. In both of those countries, China's weight is also keenly felt. But India is quickly making inroads. It has persuaded a wary Bangladesh to agree, at least in principle, to a pipeline that would ship gas from Myanmar to India. Mr. Aiyar, the petroleum minister, has been shuttling to Saudi Arabia, India's largest oil supplier, to persuade it to invest in Indian oil and gas projects, among other things. He has also sought to lure foreign investors to explore for reserves in the Bay of Bengal, off India's eastern coast - what he buoyantly calls "the North Sea of South Asia." By far, New Delhi's most ambitious proposal is a $4 billion, 1,600-mile pipeline that would ferry natural gas from Iran across Pakistan to India, though a final deal is nowhere near fruition. [Talks resumed on Saturday, when Mr. Aiyar visited Islamabad.] Pakistan stands to collect handsome transit fees from the pipeline. But how it would ensure its security across vast, restive Baluchistan Province, where disgruntled tribal armies routinely attack gas installations, remains a mystery. Among Mr. Aiyar's "fanciful dreams," as he calls them, is yet another pipeline that would dispatch gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, then into Pakistan and India. "We now realize we have to get a large part of our energy from our extended neighborhood, and that means we have to engineer and structure new relationships," said R. K. Pachauri, director general of Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi. The nonprofit institute estimates that India will need to invest $766 billion in the energy sector to meet the growing demand over the next 25 years. India's changing relationships regarding energy are inspiring a delicate diplomatic dance with the United States. Publicly, Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her visit here in March, have frowned on India's plans with Iran. India is pursuing nuclear technology as the United States and European nations are trying to get Iran to give up its own nuclear program. This week, a senior Indian official, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, was in Washington to meet with the secretary of energy, Samuel W. Bodman, to discuss, among other things, nuclear energy options. Whether the United States will turn a blind eye to the Iran pipeline or consider selling nuclear reactors to India remains uncertain. "In some sense there's a delicate tightrope walk that's going on," said Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "The Indians are trying to push the limits on what they can get away with, and the U.S. is trying to see how flexible India might be." Mr. Aiyar did not miss an opportunity to remind the United States obliquely that India would not countenance interference in one of its foreign policy priorities - buying gas from Iran. "We are sensitive to the concerns and interests of other nations," he said, "even as we expect other nations to be sensitive to our concerns and our requirements." When it comes to molding and marketing India's energy needs, Mr. Aiyar - a leftist at heart, a diplomat by training and possibly the biggest extrovert in India's Congress Party-led government - likes to think grandly. He never tires of articulating a chief goal: to persuade China to cooperate rather than compete for oil and gas abroad. Some analysts greet the idea with skepticism. Sundeep Waslekar, an analyst with Strategic Foresight Group in Mumbai, notes that China can offer a much more comprehensive and lucrative package - including arms sales - to energy-supplying countries like Iran, Sudan, or the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Unless India can offer something strategic to China - food, for instance - China would have little reason to join efforts. China-India energy cooperation in the oil and gas sector is "a beautiful academic idea," Mr. Waslekar said. "I don't see how it could work politically." Mr. Aiyar is unbowed. He offers the idea of an Asian gas grid that would stretch from former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan to the Persian Gulf all the way to China. Every chance he gets, he pushes the analogy of the European coal and gas community, the precursor to the European Union. He demands to know why China and India cannot create the Eastern equivalent. "An Asian oil and gas community, which could eventually blossom as an Asian identity in the politics of the world," he said. Of course, for now, a majority of Indians continue to live in the dark - that is to say, without electricity - and the most common fuels for Indian households remain among the worst for respiratory health: charcoal and animal dung. ======================================================= Revealed: the new scramble for Africa David Leigh and David Pallister Wednesday June 1, 2005 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1496547,00.html A new "scramble for Africa" is taking place among the world's big powers, who are tapping into the continent for its oil and diamonds. Tony Blair is pushing hard for African debt relief agreements in the run-up to the G8 summit in Scotland in July. But while sub-Saharan Africa is the object of the west's charitable concern, billions of pounds' worth of natural resources are being removed from it. A Guardian investigation beginning today reveals that instead of enriching often debt-ridden countries, some big corporations are accused by campaigners of facilitating corruption and provoking instability - so much so that organisations such as Friends of the Earth talk of an "oil curse". Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness, which has been prominent in urging reform, said: "Western companies and banks have colluded in stripping Africa's resources. We need to track revenues from oil, mining and logging into national budgets to make sure that the money isn't siphoned off by corrupt officials." Looting of state assets by corrupt leaders should become a crime under international law, he said. "The G8 should take the lead in this." The original Scramble for Africa took place in the late 19th century, when Britain, France and Germany competed to carve Africa into colonies. Today corporations from the US, France, Britain and China are competing to profit from the rulers of often chaotic and corrupt regimes. Our investigations in three African countries rich in resources - Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Liberia - show how British-based companies have negotiated deals that critics say are against the interests of some of the poorest and most traumatised people on earth. The Guardian's inquiries focus on a big gas project in Equatorial Guinea; plans to exploit Liberia's diamonds, and western banks' readiness to provide Angola with huge oil-backed loans. In Equatorial Guinea, BG plc (formerly the British Gas state company) has closed a deal with the regime of President Teodoro Obiang to buy up the country's production of liquefied natural gas for the next 17 years. Britain's HSBC bank has been accused by a US Senate committee of helping Mr Obiang move cash from the country's oil revenues into financial "black holes" in Luxembourg and Cyprus. The country is threatened with repeated coups by outsiders keen to get their hands on the oil wealth. In Liberia, which has been beset by civil war, LIB, a private London bank, was behind attempts to monopolise alluvial diamond production and the country's telecommunications. The UN and the World Bank have criticised the schemes as secretive and against the country's interests. LIB has now withdrawn. And in Angola, the victim of an even more destructive internal war, one of the UK's leading development banks, Standard Chartered, has been accused of damaging the country's economy by providing record multibillion dollar loans which give a stranglehold over future oil production. A succession of scandals has already revealed how oil wealth was looted in billions from the former Abacha military regime in Nigeria with the assistance of western banks and bribes paid by US oil firms. In Sudan and Chad, Chinese companies are moving in, backing and arming military rulers and building pipelines. And in France, the then state oil company Elf has been accused in corruption investigations of having paid kickbacks and encouraged regimes to run up debts as part of a deliberate "African strategy". Congo-Brazzaville, the fourth-largest sub-Saharan oil producer, was dominated by Elf, and now has the highest per capita debt in the world. Global Witness says in a 2004 report: "Oil wealth [there] has left a legacy of corruption, poverty and conflict." The British government is pushing an international plan for disclosure by companies of how much they pay African rulers for their natural resources. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative has been praised by anti-corruption bodies. But campaigners say that on present evidence improvements in western behaviour so far appear slight. And they fear the chances of these issues being raised as priorities at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in July remain bleak as EU countries quibble about levels of aid and the US balks at innovative schemes for debt relief. Gareth Thomas, the international development minister, said Britain hoped to have 20 African countries signed up to the transparency code by the end of the year. "There is big political support for this programme and we will be addressing the issue in the G8 summit communique," he said. ============================ Bush opposes UK Africa debt plan The UK's plan to write off debts owed by African nations is facing opposition in the US - and particularly from President George W Bush. Mr Bush said a key part of the plan did not fit with the US budget process. Mr Bush's stance sets up a possible clash with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, due in Washington next week. The UK is pushing hard for major debt relief and a doubling of aid to Africa, and Chancellor Gordon Brown laid out a set of ambitious plans on Thursday. This was a time for 100% debt relief not "timidity", Mr Brown said. The UK has said that 2005 is a vital year for Africa, and argues that without significantly more money the United Nations' Millennium Goal of halving world poverty by 2015 will be impossible to meet. 'Agreement possible' Speaking in Edinburgh, Mr Brown said he would present the proposals to the leaders of the G8 industrialised nations at a summit next month. As well as 100% debt relief, Mr Brown wants to set up an International Finance Facility (IFF) to help pay for immunisation programmes in Africa He also said that aid should be doubled to $80bn a year by 2010. But the US remains concerned that the UK is proposing that the debt plans should be financed in part by selling gold reserves held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A surge in the price of gold has boosted the value of the reserve, and the UK wants to use that extra cash. The US - along with some other countries including Japan, Germany and Italy - has never been keen on the idea of selling IMF gold. Washington DC has also raised questions over the IFF, which would allow developing countries to borrow against future aid pledges. Mr Bush said on Wednesday that the IFF for Africa "doesn't fit our budgetary process". Getting closer According to Reuters, UK government sources have been talking about pressing ahead even without US involvement. Mr Brown played down reports of a rift or stand-off between the UK and the US. "In my talks over the last few months, but particularly over the last day or two, with the US Treasury Secretary, we believe that there is common ground on securing that debt relief," he explained. "We believe it is going to be possible to reach an agreement on debt relief." "This is not a time for timidity nor a time to fear reaching too high." Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/4606197.stm ========================== January 3, 2004 Japan and China Battle for Russia's Oil and Gas By JAMES BROOKE http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/japanchina.html VOSTOCHNY, Russia - For now, Krylova Cape is not much to see: a spit of land between the Russian taiga forest and the Sea of Japan, its soil being graded a bit by a bright yellow bulldozer. But what is taking shape here is central to a pitched struggle between the two most important economies in Asia: the reigning titan, Japan, and its rising challenger, China. Both economies are hungry for raw materials, especially energy - Japan because it has almost none of its own, China because its economic boom has fast outstripped what once were adequate domestic supplies. Both want to limit their dependence on oil from distant, politically volatile regions like the Middle East. And both see an attractive alternative in the little-tapped energy riches of the vast, vacant Russian Far East. Getting oil to market from the remote East Siberian fields that Russia is ready to develop means spending billions on a pipeline. Japan and China are fighting hard over where that pipeline will go: either to China's northeastern industrial heartland, or to this stretch of Russian shoreline, where a new deep-water oil terminal will be just one day's tanker cruise from Japan. With the choice Russia faces, the political and economic dynamics of Northeast Asia stand to be profoundly shaped for years to come. "The Chinese will be furious if the Russians do not give them the pipeline," said Graham Hutchings, an Asian specialist with the British consulting group Oxford Analytica. And no one expects it to be the last time Japan and China collide over the resources they both need. China has been talking to Russia about Siberian oil for a decade, and its need has grown acute. It is on a pace to overtake Japan next year as the world's second-largest oil consumer, and to catch the leader, the United States, sometime around 2030, by quintupling its current demand. Energy shortages plague the country, with 21 provinces experiencing rationing and blackouts so far this fall and winter, twice as many as last year. A Russia-China pipeline, Chinese officials say, would be a natural north-south marriage between Asia's largest oil exporter and what will soon be Asia's largest oil importer. Japan, whose demand for oil is slowly falling because of anemic growth and a shift from manufacturing, came later to the game, making a serious alternative proposal only a year ago. But it has steadily sweetened its bid, while the financing of the Chinese plan remains fuzzy. Japan now is offering to put up $5 billion for pipeline construction and another $2 billion for oil field development, while holding out the prospect that a pipeline to the Sea of Japan could handle oil exports to America, too. The pipeline rivalry offers a taste of more battles to come, as China moves aggressively to secure access to resources it needs to keep wheels spinning in "the factory to the world." Moving around Asia, China is financing copper and coal mines in Mongolia, building another oil pipeline in Kazakhstan, negotiating over gas development in Turkmenistan, buying gas fields and signing long-term supply contracts in Australia and Indonesia and buying steel in South Korea. So far, the biggest market impact has been on industrial commodities like coal, copper and iron ore. Many have reversed long declines and started rising, as Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean manufacturers find themselves competing with China for supplies and bidding prices up. But in oil, Japan and China are competing over more than just price. "We are about to enter an age in which Japan and China scramble for oil," Yoichi Funabashi, international affairs columnist for Japan's Asahi Shimbun, wrote recently. "China acts, and Japan reacts. Now, we are losing the oil race." In Japan's rush to get in on Siberian oil development, it has all but ignored the inconvenient diplomatic fact that Japan and Russia never signed a peace treaty after World War II. For decades, the sticking point has been Japanese claims over four islands in the Kurile chain north of Hokkaido that Soviet forces seized in the autumn of 1945. "Energy security, energy diversity, energy from across the Japan Sea is sufficiently important to move the Kurile Islands way down the list" of priorities, said Stephen O'Sullivan, head of oil and gas research at UFG, a Moscow-based investment bank. Japan has quietly decided to deal with the island question separately and not let it block economic relations with Russia. "It is the issue which is being left aside," Vladimir I. Ivanov, a Russian economist, said by telephone from Niigata, Japan, where he researches regional energy issues. "Nobody wants to link the islands with the pipeline project." In Moscow, advocates of a China pipeline say that binding Russia and China together in economic interdependence would be good for regional stability, on the model of Canada and the United States. Similar reasoning helped propel a $17 billion project to build a 3,055-mile natural gas pipeline from eastern Siberia to serve northeast China and South Korea, which won initial approval in November. China's voracious appetite for energy is also lighting a competitive fire under Japan's conservative electric utilities, which have been slow to commit to new development projects. Exxon Mobil tried for years with little success to interest Japanese utilities in a 1,200-mile gas pipeline from its gas development on Sakhalin Island, Russia, to Tokyo. Interest suddenly perked up when Exxon Mobil let it be known that it was studying an alternative 1,000-mile pipeline to Harbin, China. China has also plunged ahead with deals to bring in more liquefied natural gas from Indonesia and Australia, where Japan also buys gas. "Japan Inc. is thinking that there is no shortage of supply, that there will be another bus in a minute," Mr. O'Sullivan said. "China is building terminals." The yellow bulldozer's grading work here will not be in vain, whatever Moscow decides. Krylova Cape is at the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Next year, work will begin in earnest on the oil terminal, with plans for 140,000 barrels of oil a day to reach the port by rail for shipment to Japan and elsewhere. "Krylova Cape is a good spot," Viktor S. Gnedzilov, mayor of Nakhodka, the municipality that oversees the cape and this port, said in an interview. "There is the railroad. The piers can be extended one kilometer. We expect that vessels up to 300,000 tons could come to the pier. It would be a colossal benefit for Nakhodka - jobs, businesses, development, foreign investments." In Russia's thinly populated Far East, the Japanese pipeline is seen as a counterbalance to China, a partner Russians view with some misgivings. "Many people here believe Japan is a more predictable country," said Alexei Kabanchenko, spokesman for Nakhodka, a Slavic outpost whose billboards proclaim: "Russia starts here." Many Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, have also said that Russia would gain economic clout if East Siberian oil were to be sold on the world market rather than to just one customer, China. "We had a cruel lesson with a gas pipeline to Turkey," Viktor V. Gorchakov, regional vice governor for economic affairs, said in Vladivostok, the regional capital. Once it was built, he said, the Turks reneged on earlier agreements. "They told us, 'We don't need gas, cut the prices down,' " he said. "You get a lesson like that once. But not again." For their part, Chinese officials say that the Russians risk hitching their future to a fading partner if they choose Japan. They express frustration that the question has not yet been decided. "We really put high importance on that pipeline," said Yang Bojiang, Northeast Asian studies director of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, on a recent visit to Tokyo. "When we faced them at first, I thought they were sincere," Mr. Yang said of the Russian negotiators. "Now, I think they are probably playing a game. The Japanese have been promising to pay more." President Hu Jintao thought he had won the pipeline last May when he visited Moscow and signed a communiqué with Mr. Putin endorsing the Chinese route. On the same visit, a Chinese state-owned oil company signed a 20-year, $150 billion agreement with Yukos, Russia's largest oil company, in which Yukos promised to supply China with 400,000 barrels of oil a day by 2005, and 600,000 barrels a day by 2010. The Russian national railway system also announced recently that it would expand sixfold its capacity for shipping oil to China. But China lost an important advocate in Moscow on Oct. 25, when Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the chief executive of Yukos, was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud. Now political winds seem to blow Japan's way: the regional governors in the Russian Far East are lobbying hard for the Japan route. Mr. Putin's own representative in the region, Konstantin Pulikovsky, favors it so strongly that he once called himself "a Japanese ambassador." Still, the decision may come down to economics, not politics. The China route proposed by Yukos would be shorter, faster and cheaper: 1,400 miles long and about $2.8 billion and seven years to build, compared with 2,300 miles, about $5.8 billion and a decade to build the Japan route. The Japanese pipeline would be larger - a million barrels a day rather than 600,000 - but many Russians from President Putin on down wonder whether enough oil can be produced in East Siberia to fill it. Advocates say that, given advances in oil exploration and production technology, building the pipeline would make it feasible to explore and develop new fields believed to lie east of Lake Baikal but not worth pursuing in the past. Despite a strong showing by economic nationalists in Russia's Dec. 7 parliamentary elections, the energy minister, Igor Yosufov, is encouraging joint ventures with Japanese companies to explore eastern reserves now listed as probable rather than proven. Confirming their potential would add weight to the argument for a Sea of Japan pipeline. But disappointing results in Eastern Siberia could make a smaller pipeline to China the only viable choice. Russia needs to develop oil exports to fulfill President Putin's promise to double the size of the nation's economy in this decade. It already produces much more oil than it needs domestically; bottlenecks in export pipelines, now straining at full capacity, have glutted the domestic market and pushed prices down to about $4.50 a barrel in Russia, only one-seventh of the world price. Transneft, the state pipeline monopoly, is working on projects to expand its export capacity to ports on the Baltic and White seas. As for the Far East, all eyes are now on Mr. Putin and his choice of pipeline routes, as China and Japan each try to sway him. Watching from a relatively neutral perch, Thomas U. Berger, a Boston University professor of international relations, said on a visit to Tokyo: "This is the great Asian oil game of the 21st century." No Blood For Oil Page =========================================== Russia - Japan Tokyo Casts Pipeline Financing in Doubt http://www.templetonthorp.com/ru/news927 Japan is threatening to withdraw its offer to help finance an $11.5 billion oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific coast if the government goes ahead with a plan to build a spur to China first, the Financial Times reported Friday. Energy-hungry China and Japan have been competing for the rights for first access to Siberian oil for years. When Russia finally announced last year that it would build the pipeline to the Pacific coast, it was seen as a victory for Japan. But Japan's trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, told the FT last week that Moscow had raised the possibility it could build the 4,100-kilometer pipeline in two stages and extend a spur from Skovorodino in eastern Siberia to China. Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko signed off on a decree last week that ordered the first $6.5 billion section of the pipeline to be laid from Taishet in the Irkutsk region to Skovorodino by late 2008. While work begins on the second section of the project to extend the pipeline to the Pacific coast, the oil would be transported by rail to a terminal on the coast. But Skovorodino's proximity to the Chinese border, just 69 kilometers away, throws open the possibility that a spur to China could be built before the Pacific coast link is finished, the paper reported. Building a spur to China first could endanger the completion of the link to the Pacific, particularly if exploration in eastern Siberia yields disappointing results or does not proceed at all. The Trans-Siberian link is planned to have an initial capacity of 600,000 barrels per day and to climb after completion of the second phase to 1.6 million bpd. China would easily consume the initial 600,000 bpd, opening the possibility that the second stage might not go ahead. Oil pipeline monopoly Transneft did not rule out that China might be able to tap into the pipeline first through the link to Skovorodino. "We are building a pipeline across our own territory. No one will decide for us who gets oil through it first," Transneft vice president Sergei Grigoriyev told the FT. "If the pipeline stops halfway, then there's a big risk that the oil will never reach Japan," said Nakagawa, whose ministry is in charge of Japan's energy policy, the FT reported. "The point I made [to Russia] is, we would not be able to provide taxpayers' money for such a risky project." Grigoriyev, however, said Japanese funding was not necessary to complete the project, the FT said. Russian oil firms, meanwhile, are indicating that proposed transport charges for the pipeline are too high to make the development of eastern Siberian fields commercially viable. "In the current circumstances, oil firms have no interest in developing new regions, especially east Siberia," the president of No. 4 oil firm Surgutneftegaz, Vladimir Bogdanov, told Prime-Tass. He called on the government to cut taxes for those firms that would develop eastern Siberia and use the expensive Asian pipeline. Transneft head Semyon Vainshtok told Kommersant last week that the average shipping fee on the route would be $49.90 per ton -- lower than expected but twice as high as the current fees from western Siberia to Europe. "We are going to apply a special price -- the closer [oil is produced] the more expensive it would be, the further, the cheaper. Then oil firms would be free to decide which market [Asian or European] they prefer," he said. Transneft has said that the first shipments via the pipeline would rely on crude from western Siberia, as the region is already connected to Irkutsk, but that it would need 1 million bpd from eastern Siberia to fill the pipeline completely. Bogdanov, however, said the price should be set at a maximum of $30. (The Moscow Times 03.v.05) ================================================== "The People's Republic of China (China) is the world's most populous country and the second largest energy consumer (after the United States). Production and consumption of coal, its dominant fuel, is the highest in the world. Rising oil demand and imports have made China a significant factor in world oil markets. China also surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest petroleum consumer in 2003." - Country Analysis Briefs: China, US Department of Energy http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/china.html ====================================================== Measures of Petroleum Dependence and Vulnerability in OECD Countries Originally published in "the Middle East Economic Survey" (MEES 46:16, April 21, 2003) http://www.wtrg.com/oecd/OECD0304.html ~