PetroChina parent to quintuple exploration spending to help realise Xi’s national energy security goal

China National Petroleum Corp., the nation’s largest oil and gas producer, will quintuple its resource exploration budget to 5 billion yuan this year, to help slow the nation’s growing dependence on foreign oil and gas, according to chairman Wang Yilin.

The energy titan will also lift its broader budget for discovering new resources and ascertaining their economically extractable volumes by 25 per cent from last year without giving the spending level, said the parent of listed PetroChina in an interview by group online newsletter China Petroleum Daily.

China’s foreign oil dependency has risen to almost 70 per cent and that of natural gas to 45.3 per cent last year, he noted. This compares with 52 per cent for oil in 2010 and 29 per cent for gas in 2012.

“As energy is a lifeline of the economy, CNPC as a key state enterprise and the nation’s largest oil and gas supplier, must carry out the political task of enhancing national energy security by having a sound long term resource development strategy,” he was quoted on Monday as saying at the sidelines of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

China last year surpassed Japan to become the world’s largest natural gas importer, after Beijing launched an aggressive campaign to convert coal-fired boilers supplying households and factories to natural gas-fired ones to reduce chronic air pollution.