China Doubles Down on Iraqi Oil Gamble
China is hoping to increase the volume of oil it purchases from Iraq by some 70 percent in 2014, Reuters reports . Speaking at the World Energy Congress in South Korea on Wednesday, Hussain Al-Shahristani, Iraq’s deputy prime minister for energy, said that China has told Iraq that it hopes to purchase at least 850,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Baghdad next year, up more than two-thirds from the 500,000 bpd of crude it is importing from Iraq this year. This would put Iraq up there with China’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia. Last year China imported around 1.1 million bpd from Saudi Arabia, which accounted for roughly 20 percent of Beijing’s total oil imports. Altogether, China imported about 2.9 million bpd of oil from the Middle East in 2011, or 60 percent of its total oil imports. As the increase in imports from Iraq suggests, China’s heavy reliance on Middle Eastern oil isn’t likely to change significantly for the foreseeable future, despite C...