– China and India join hands in Oil Bidding!

China and India combining their resources to jointly bid on Oil fields.. so that they dont outbid each other and raise the price of oil for themselves! Thats a great strategy.. the only issue is that it has been rather difficult to trust the Chinese friendship.. In so much as this deal from the Indian side factors in the inethical and aggressive nature of the Chinese Govt. this is a great start!

This kind of joint bidding also spells danger to the Western countries… specially US.. who may want to get aggressive too.. Oil and Gas may well assume serious ramifications with Russia having already started using it as a state weapon!

India and China, the most aggressive shoppers for oil and gas assets in the world, and normally archrivals in the race for overseas oilfields, have finally come together to pursue their energy security in the global arena.

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), the two largest oil companies in the respective countries, announced on December 20 that they had jointly won a bid to acquire 37% of Petro-Canada’s stake in Syrian oilfields for US$573 million. ONGC and CNPC, both state-owned, will have equal stakes in the al-Furat oil and gas fields.

“We are very excited about this breakthrough of joint acquisitions with CNPC,” said Subir Raha, the chairman of ONGC, who maintains a very high profile in not only the country’s oil and gas industry but the globally as well.

“CNPC and ONGC have been working together as joint operators in Sudan for the last three years. While we have worked together as joint operators and have gained confidence in each other’s technical capabilities, we had never joined hands to own a foreign property jointly. This [will] be the first time, then, that an Indian company [will] acquire an oil property along with a Chinese company.”

Indeed, as experts have said, although in monetary terms a $573-million deal may not be very significant, this one is significant because ONGC’s overseas arm ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) had competed with Chinese firms for oil properties in Central Asia, West Africa and Latin America in the recent past.

In addition, in the past 12 months, Chinese oil companies have been consistently outmaneuvering India in just about every oil property the two countries chased. In their bid for oil security, the two countries, allege oil industry analysts, have also contributed immensely to the record high oil prices this year.

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