Buoyed by White House inaction, China’s state-owned oil company has made a multibillion-dollar bid for a Canadian company with interests in Canada’s oil sands — North American oil for the lamps of China.
‘Do we really want to be buying our oil or Canadian oil back from the Chinese?” asked Sen. John Hoeven on Thursday as he reacted to news that China’s state-owned oil company, CNOOC Ltd., had launched a $15.1 billion takeover bid for Canada’s Nexen Inc., a company with operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Our answer would be no. But it may happen, thanks to the Obama administration’s indifference to developing energy resources anywhere on the North American continent or building the Keystone XL pipeline linking Alberta’s oil-rich sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
“This is really a direct result of the administration’s resistance to Keystone,” Hoeven said. Hoeven, a Republican, represents North Dakota, where oil production is booming. The pipeline would carry some of that oil to southern refineries, bringing up to 20,000 immediate jobs and perhaps 10 times that many in an economic ripple effect.
Hoeven was joined by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to unveil a package of energy proposals that would allow for more drilling on government-owned land, reduce regulations, streamline drilling permits and approve the Keystone XL pipeline carrying oil from Canada.
Prior to Nexen, CNOOC has made roughly $6 billion in smaller acquisitions in recent years. It has most notably hooked up with Chesapeake Energy for a joint venture in the Eagle Ford Shale formation in Texas, and with Norway’s Statoil in the Gulf of Mexico, an area where the Obama administration has placed draconian restrictions on U.S. drilling.
What?
America buys everything else from the Chinese so who cares.
More to the point……does canada want a middle man in oil? Taking a profit out first before selling to US………..seems silly.
Canada doesn’t care, and shouldn’t, who buys their oil. Running through intermediaries raises the cost to us. The scary thing is that China can leapfrog over decades of engineering techniques to learn how to frack (Chesapeake) and drill in deep ocean (Nexen) which will be helpful as China takes over the South China Sea.