China buying Nigerian oil company

It might have been nice if Bush had invaded Iraq for oil, and it would have been REALLY nice if the invasion had worked out, but I have to live in the real world on Planet Earth, not on whatever planet our crackhead president lives.

Americans get more oil from Nigeria than from the Persian Gulf, and Nigeria continued to supply the US with oil during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. Yes, your gasoline depends on a steady supply from Nigeria, but that supply is now being encroached on by the steady expansion of Chinese economic interests. So not only does the upheaval in Iraq mean less petroleum on the market, what's up for grabs is slipping away.

from AllAfrica.com:

China National Offshore Oil Company Limited (CNOOC), yesterday said it will pay $2.3 billion (N299 billion) in cash to acquire 45 per cent shares of South Atlantic Petroleum, owned by former Defence Minister, Gen. Theophilus Danjuma (rtd), in Akpo oil field located in OPL 246.


The company is financing this with internal resources and expects to make a tidy profit. There is an insurgency, and India decided it was too risky, but the Nigerian insurgency is nothing compared to the insurgency in Iraq.

CNOOC is China's biggest offshore oil producer, and its acquisition of interest in the Nigerian oil field would be China's third big overseas takeover since August 2004 to meet increasing energy demand.

That's right, folks, while your government is busy in Iraq trying to (what? why are we there? what's the excuse this week?) secure the oil fields, the Chinese are doing it the old fashioned way, buying it.

China, which was expected to consume 6.63 million barrels a day of oil last year, imported an average of 2.38 million barrels a day in the first three quarters of 2005, or 36 percent of the total, according to December 2005 Oil Market Report by the International Energy Agency in Paris.

And their apetite is only going to get bigger.

Don't you wish your government had seriously invested in alternative energy sources? Maybe the Japanese will. They seem to like us better than the Chinese do, if anyone does.