"Bob Crantz" wrote in message thlink.net...
The Bush haters claim the war in Iraq is solely for oil.

Then they blame Bush for the high price of oil and that it is no good for
the country.


Thats the funny thing, Bush has nothing to do with the current high prices.

If you need to blame someone blame the Chinese. They are the cause of it.
Also the high price of steel, and cement is due to the chinese.

Supply and demand folks!

Joe








BC

Thats the funny thing, Bush has nothing to do with the current high prices.


Actually, Bush' poor relationships have a LOT to do with current gas prices.
The US is simply getting no consideration with this president.

RB

Do you believe 'every' excuse your Govt makes for the mess they've
made?

Yes, clearly he does!


RB

If you need to blame someone blame the Chinese. They are the cause
of it.
Also the high price of steel, and cement is due to the chinese.

Supply and demand folks!

Joe

Bwaaahahahhahahahahahahahahahaaa!
So whenever a Bomb goes off in the Middle East and the price goes up
yet again, the Chinese are to blame?

Do you believe 'every' excuse your Govt makes for the mess they've
made?


Oz1...of the 3 twins.


China is part of it. The other part is that idiot tree-huggers have
obstructed new American refinery construction for three decades. That's
the biggest bottleneck in US supply.

----------------
China's growing appetite for oil
Boom: Beijing's super-heated economy is fueling an enormous demand for
energy, one of a number of factors driving up costs.
By Gady A. Epstein
Baltimore Sun
May 31, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-
te.asia31may31,0,1974318.story

BEIJING -- Several times a year, Liu Shangqi dutifully leaves his
comfortable life at home for trips to far-off countries on behalf of
his employer, China National Petroleum Corp., China's largest oil
company. A mild-mannered chief engineer, he does not go out of a sense
of adventure.

"I always feel nervous on these kinds of trips, because the local
employees tell us the place isn't safe," said Liu, who recently spent a
few weeks in Venezuela with Chinese workers who are there year-round to
develop an oil field in service of China's worldwide quest for
petroleum. "Most of the time we are stuck in three places -- the place
to eat, the place to work and the place to sleep."

Laboring far from families and friends, the oil workers have "no real
life," said Liu. "The only thing that keeps them going in such hard
places is to find oil there for China."

If Liu's description makes China's oil workers sound like old-fashioned
worker-heroes in a national propaganda campaign, that's not far off the
mark. China's state-run oil giants, which until a decade ago focused
almost exclusively on domestic production, are engaged in a highly
competitive worldwide search for oil that symbolizes the nation's
growing appetite for natural resources.

The country's oil consumption has doubled in the past decade, and China
last year surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest user of
petroleum -- consuming about 6 million barrels a day.

The super-heated Chinese economy has been responsible for recent
worldwide price increases for commodities ranging from coal to copper
to iron ore. But the country's most significant effect on world markets
is from China's shift in the past decade from oil exporter to major oil
importer.

Chinese oil consumption has accounted for nearly 40 percent of the
growth in global oil consumption since 2000. That rise in demand has
come not from the growing number of cars on China's roads but from
energy-hungry power plants and industrial boilers. Even if the
country's economic growth slows, as many experts expect, the rapid pace
of urbanization will continue increasing China's oil consumption,
possibly doubling it within a decade.

Meanwhile, production growth at China's own fields is leveling off,
magnifying the country's dependency on imports. China now imports a
third of its oil -- about 2 million barrels a day -- and some analysts
estimate that by 2020, imports may account for up to 75 percent of
China's oil.

"Chinese oil consumers are the driving force" in today's oil prices,
said Scott Roberts, director in Beijing for Cambridge Energy Research
Associates. Partly because of Chinese demand, tanker rates for
delivering petroleum from the Persian Gulf have doubled, raising the
barrel price for everybody.

Cutting back

China's oil imports feed an economy that is starving for energy. This
year, most Chinese provinces have had at least temporary power cutoffs,
and the problem is most pronounced in the places where the economy
needs electricity the most. For lack of power, factories routinely shut
production in the thriving coastal provinces of Guangdong in the south
and Zhejiang and Jiangsu in the east, and in China's largest city and
de facto economic hub, Shanghai.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, recently asked all cities to reduce
energy consumption, as China's top planners come to grips with the
notion that the country cannot sustain its own growth. Major cities
have launched less sweeping campaigns to hold down electricity use,
including prohibitions on neon lights and limits on the use of air
conditioning.

In the hot southern city of Guangzhou, shopping malls, hotels and
factories are urged to set their air conditioners a couple of degrees
higher. Businesses that set their air conditioners lower than 77
degrees are subject to criticism in the state news media, according to
the Guangzhou Daily

The energy crunch is of vital concern to China's Communist Party
leaders. Beijing considers economic growth a key to social stability,
which in turn preserves their power. To maintain growth, the government
must create tens of millions of jobs a year, and to create those jobs,
the government needs ample supplies of petroleum.

Provinces are fast-tracking the construction of new electrical
generating plants, but their power is not yet available. That has led
to even higher demand for oil, as the government keeps operating old
oil-fired plants, and factories rely on generators powered by diesel
fuel and oil.

The one part of demand that has not exceeded supply has been gasoline
for cars, despite an astounding 75 percent increase in car sales last
year in China. Because of the way oil is refined here, China produces
more gasoline than it needs and still exports it.

But with rising incomes and relentless migration to the cities, China's
car boom has only just begun. That inevitably means the construction of
yet more suburbs and roads, and higher consumption of gasoline.

To ensure stable supplies, China may soon begin buying even more oil
than it needs, and create its own strategic oil reserve, modeled on
that of the United States.

Some oil industry experts suggest that the current rise in prices is a
product of a fundamental misreading of China's needs.

"China's oil demand caught the world by surprise," said Mark Qiu, chief
financial officer of CNOOC Limited, the third-largest China oil
company. "That shock happened to be pretty severe."

Investors for a time didn't direct enough money into oil production, he
said, but that trend has been reversed and could drive prices down.

But anxious about the country's future growth, China has pushed oil
companies to search aggressively for new oil supplies overseas.

'Oil is always political'

In addition to projects in Venezuela, Chinese companies are
investigating or participating in oil and natural gas ventures in more
than a dozen countries. Chinese companies have also recently expanded
oil ventures in Saudi Arabia, and China National Petroleum Corp. hopes
to revive an oil deal that it signed in 1997 with Iraq.

China has done business with other countries where American and
European companies can't or won't go, such as Sudan. China National
Petroleum Corp. bought a controlling stake in an oil field there in
1997.

Sudan's regime is accused of encouraging a genocidal campaign against
its non-Muslim populations, but Sudan is also China's fourth-largest
source of oil imports. This month, a Chinese firm began building a
quarter-mile-long bridge over the Nile in northern Sudan with $10
million in funding from China National Petroleum Corp.

"Maybe in such areas, a bigger company -- for example, the U.S. or
European companies, from the developed countries -- maybe they don't
want to go there. But China will go there, because there are no other
places," said Liu, the engineer. "The places we go, either the
conditions to drill for oil are pretty hard, or they have serious
security problems that developed countries would not dare step their
foot in."

Qiu, of CNOOC, said business comes before politics for his firm. But,
he cautioned, "Oil is always political."

It's still unclear whether China's decision to pay a premium to
diversify its oil and gas resources will prove worthwhile. There is,
for example, a decision made this month by CNPC to build an 800-mile
segment of a $3 billion, 1,800-mile pipeline from Kazakstan to China.

Supporters say it gives China an important foothold in the oil-rich
Caspian Sea region. But one oil industry expert in Beijing called it
a "white elephant" deal, noting that China will still have to rely on
the world market to meet its oil needs.

Liu now spends up to a few months each year applying his expertise at
heavy crude oil fields abroad. It is not the life Liu expected when he
chose to go into petroleum science in 1980, when China was producing
all of its oil at home and exporting around the world.

"There aren't a lot of good oil fields left, and it's not easy to get
into those good ones," Liu said. "The competition from American and
European companies is fierce. And second there is competition from the
other Chinese oil companies. They all want to go overseas to develop
oil."

In article , OzOne wrote:

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 20:50:02 +0200 (CEST), Anonymous
scribbled thusly:

If you need to blame someone blame the Chinese. They are the cause
of it.
Also the high price of steel, and cement is due to the chinese.

Supply and demand folks!

Joe

Bwaaahahahhahahahahahahahahahaaa!
So whenever a Bomb goes off in the Middle East and the price goes up
yet again, the Chinese are to blame?

Do you believe 'every' excuse your Govt makes for the mess they've
made?


Oz1...of the 3 twins.


China is part of it.

Yep, but ain't it funny how their demand went up immediately after the
US invasion of Iraq?

Nah. They're stockpiling in case they're next.

PDW

(Bobsprit) wrote in message ...
Do you believe 'every' excuse your Govt makes for the mess they've
made?


Your an idiot, do some research numb nut's


Yes, clearly he does!

Yeah and I made up China.....U Left wing loser.


RB

China is part of it.


OzOne wrote:
Yep, but ain't it funny how their demand went up immediately after the
US invasion of Iraq?

It's just a coincidence.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Meanwhile, don't forget to also pay no attention to the ~90 million $$$
that Halliburton has overcharged the gov't and the Army in Iraq. Oops!
I'm sure they didn't mean to.

DSK