This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde.
Standing in front of a stopped truck in the desert, two workers in red overalls are pumping water out of an oil slick before installing a new derrick. The landscape is moonlike. Off on the horizon is the city of Karamay, a bona fide boomtown in northwestern China that has multiplied in only a few short years. The growth in Chinese energy consumption has accelerated the movement. On May 12 the economic planning body of the government announced the suspension of Chinese diesel exports and the “strict control” of foreign sales of other refined petroleum products. The National Commission for Development and Reform called on the three large Chinese producers to “ensure full operational capacity,” in order to “maintain social stability and support economic growth,” just as the price of a barrel of oil had reached 100 dollars.
In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, but the country continues to export refined petroleum products to Vietnam, Japan, and Singapore, as well as some Western countries.
This appetite is noticed in the “city of black oil,” where oil rigs are pumping as far as the eye can see. In February, Petrochina announced an increase in production for the Karamay oil field, which in just two months has gone from 25,870 tons to 29,000 tons per day. The most important oil field in the west of the country produced nearly 11 million tons of crude oil last year. In 2011, Petrochina began the exploitation of local oil reserves of heavy crude, whose density makes transporting and refining it more expensive. The reserves found in Xinjiang explain, in part, Beijing’s interest in the region, where ethnic tensions between the migrant Hans and Uighurs are lively and even led to bloody riots in Urumqi in July 2009. In Karamay, the equation is simpler because three-fourths of the population are migrant Hans, recruited by Petrochina. The Uighurs say they can be hired only if they can speak Mandarin Chinese. Nevertheless, the two communities rarely mix.
Professor Gou Haitao, a researcher at the Chinese University of Petroleum, explains that Xinjiang is crucial for the energy strategy of the country. A pipeline connects the region to Kazakhstan before the imported oil from Central Asia and the oil produced in Xinjiang are delivered to the coastal industrial provinces of the East. Closest to these dynamic coastal zones, the oil fields of the northeast are emptying.
