China's July Crude Output Falls 1.7% as Imports Climb

China's crude oil output fell 1.7 percent last month as aging fields prompted the world's second- biggest energy user to boost imports.

Oil production fell to 15.47 million metric tons (about 113 million barrels) in July from a year earlier, according to an e- mailed statement today from the Beijing-based China Mainland Marketing Research Co., which compiles data for the National Bureau of Statistics.

The nation's crude oil imports surged 39 percent to a record in July as production from domestic fields failed to keep pace with energy demand. PetroChina Co.'s Jidong Nanpu find, China's largest discovery in almost half a century, may not compensate for falling output from Daqing, the country's oldest oil field, until 2012.

"There's limited growth for increased production capacity at domestic oil fields and this has led to greater dependence on imports," Wu Jun, an analyst with China International Futures (Shanghai) Co., said by phone today. "China has a huge foreign reserve which it is using to buy more energy resources overseas."

Raw coal output rose 12.7 percent to 196 million tons and electricity production climbed 15.5 percent to 291.6 million megawatt-hours in July, the statistics bureau said today.

China's oil imports climbed to 14.83 million tons last month, according to customs data released on Aug. 10. China's economy expanded 11.9 percent in the second quarter, the fastest pace in 12 years.

PetroChina, the nation's biggest oil producer, plans to produce 10 million tons from Jidong Nanpu by 2012, the company said May 16. Output may climb as much as 6 percent annually in the next 10 years, as the field starts production in late 2009, Gordon Kwan, head of China Oil & Gas Research at CLSA Ltd., told reporters in Shanghai on May 15.

The U.S. is the world's biggest energy consumer.