Lu Jianhua, Director of Foreign Trade Department of the MOC, told the Asian Business Forum held recently, that it is unfair to blame China for rising international oil prices.
According to statistics,
It is estimated that
The price of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) closed at 56.35 dollars per barrel Thursday, it's lowest since July.
It is reasonable for the price of oil to fall and there's room for it to drop even further, Lu predicted.
This summer the world saw crude oil prices hovering at 60 US dollars per barrel and even surge to a record of 70 US dollars.
Such high oil prices can be attributed to financial speculation rather than the normal market forces of supply and demand.
According to statistics released by BP this year, 2004 witnessed a growth in global oil demand of 3.4 percent, which was lower than that year's growth in production capacity of 4.5 percent. This indicates that
"The world's capacity to supply is still greater than the demand and that has not changed," said Zhou Dadi, Director of the Research Institute of Energy, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) at a forum on petroleum held last week.
"So it is not valid to say that
In 2004,
In order to enhance China's security of oil supply it should try to reduce its dependency on oil imports to about 30 percent and not exceed more than 50 percent, said Xu Shoubo, an academic of Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The Chinese government says reducing the country's energy demand and improving energy efficiency is extremely important.
In the proposal for the 11th Five Year Program, the blueprint for the economic and social development of the country from 2006 to 2010 issued last month, the government made clear the goal to reduce its per unit GDP energy consumption by 20 percent at the end of 2010.
Currently nearly 70 percent of
Developing new and renewable resources, improving the country's energy efficiency and keeping its demand for imported oil at a moderate rate of growth will sustain