Taiwan's oil company to invest $1.18bn a year

TAIPEI: Taiwan's state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp (CPC) said Tuesday it will invest Tw$34 billion ($1.18 billion) annually in the next five years to acquire and explore overseas energy resources.

CPC plans to spend Tw$30 billion a year on acquiring oil and gas fields mainly in Africa and the Asia Pacific region while the rest will go on oil exploration, it said.

As a result, the company expects to be able to boost its daily crude output from 12,000 barrels daily at present to 27,000 barrels a day from 2012, a company official said.

The company is in talks to buy oil and gas fields in Africa and Australia, with expectations that deals can be concluded by late this year or early next year, she said.

CPC started exploring oil reserves abroad in the 1970s and its latest venture in Chad is estimated to have at least 100 million barrels in reserves.

CPC supplies about 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day or about 60 percent of Taiwan's daily usage, of which only one percent is produced by itself and the rest is imported.

Taiwan does not have any oil resources of its own and is dependent on imports mainly from the Middle East and Africa.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011