Chinese Top Oil Companies

China's top oil producing and offshore oil companies released reports about their major discoveries.

PetroChina announced it had discovered a "very rich" oil field at Bohai Bay the biggest in China in the past decade while CNOOC said it has an "exciting find", also in Bohai Bay.

With an initial daily output of 500 tons (3,700 barrels), the Bohai Bay field is "the largest find in China in 10 years," Jiang Jiemin, vice-chairman and president of PetroChina, told a press conference in Hong Kong yesterday.

"The two new fields are milestone discoveries. They have very steady output so far," said Jiang.

Before that, China's largest fossil fuel find in the last 10 years was a 400-million-ton oil field in Northwest China by PetroChina.

Meanwhile, CNOOC announced yesterday that the Bohai Bay discovery involved a test output of 1,600 barrels of oil and approximately 10 million cubic feet of gas per day.

Zhu Weilin, vice-president of CNOOC, said of the "exciting" discovery: "We hope to develop a large-scale cluster of oil and gas fields (there) in the future."