Enron is winding up its China operations, with foreign and domestic firms competing for its controlling share of a major power station in the southwest city of Chengdu.
'It is selling off all its assets and has no people left and its office is closed,' said an official of Houston-based Burlington Resources, which last year purchased from Enron part of a project to develop oil and gas in the central basin of Sichuan province, in the southwest.
Enron's office on the 33rd floor of China World Tower, one of Beijing's most prestigious office blocks, was closed and empty of furniture yesterday. Neighbours said the staff of about five left at the end of last month.
Enron signed the US$45 million contract to develop the basin with China National Petroleum Corp last September, a mainland newspaper said. It has estimated reserves of one trillion cubic metres of gas.
The paper listed three other large projects in which Enron was involved since it entered the Chinese market in 1993 with its headquarters in Hong Kong.
One was a 160-megawatt BOT (build, operate and transfer) power station in the Wenchang district of Hainan, which went into operation in 1995. In 2000, the Hainan power company bought the management contract from Enron, ending its involvement.
The second was a 765km natural-gas pipeline from Zhongxian county in Sichuan to Wuhan and the third a 284-megawatt coal-fired power station in Chengdu, of which it held 51 per cent, with the remainder held by Sichuan Power, involving an investment of 2.3 billion yuan (about HK$2.19 billion).
