On a leafy street in Almaty, a few hundred miles from Kazakhstan's border with China, the elegant mansion of China National Petroleum Corporation is kept under close guard. Behind its closed shutters, Chinese oilmen have plotted a strategy to win a huge portfolio of Kazakh energy assets to feed their country's need for oil.China began discreetly buying Kazakh oilfields 10 years ago and now has more energy projects on the go in the central Asian nation than any other country. While the west's biggest oil groups agonise over the risks of undertaking expensive infrastructure developments in obscure locations, Beijing has boldly built a 3,000km pipeline to lock Kazakhstan's oilfields into its orbit.
On a leafy street in Almaty, a few hundred miles from Kazakhstan's border with China, the elegant mansion of China National Petroleum Corporation is kept under close guard. Behind its closed shutters, Chinese oilmen have plotted a strategy to win a huge portfolio of Kazakh energy assets to feed their country's need for oil.
China began discreetly buying Kazakh oilfields 10 years ago and now has more energy projects on the go in the central Asian nation than any other country. While the west's biggest oil groups agonise over the risks of undertaking expensive infrastructure developments in obscure locations, Beijing has boldly built a 3,000km pipeline to lock Kazakhstan's oilfields into its orbit.
Sombre oil executives fear they will never be able to compete with the deep pockets of China's government-backed companies and will be driven out of the few last available new oil patches. The predicament seems even more dire in light of warnings from authorities including the International Energy Agency, the rich countries' energy watchdog, that the world is heading towards another oil crunch by the middle of the coming decade. At a conference last month, Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of France's Total, challenged other oil executives to disprove his theory that the world would never be able to produce more than 100m barrels of oil a day - 20 per cent more than today - because so many of its remaining reserves lay in countries unwilling or unable to let international oil companies tap them.
The predicament seems even more dire in light of warnings from authorities including the International Energy Agency, the rich countries' energy watchdog, that the world is heading towards another oil crunch by the middle of the coming decade.
At a conference last month, Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of France's Total, challenged other oil executives to disprove his theory that the world would never be able to produce more than 100m barrels of oil a day - 20 per cent more than today - because so many of its remaining reserves lay in countries unwilling or unable to let international oil companies tap them.
Neo-Classical Economic training can seriously handicap western businesspeople in their dealings with China for this reason. Their expectations are often wrong. This would be a worthy subject for a Chaplinesque slap stick comedy were our personal and national welfares not taking the fall as well. The pull of the paradigm is such that all China had to do was appear to be adopting capitalist principles and many, many of those dealing with them thought: "Oh, good! Now I understand how to deal with them!" Wrong. Massive fail. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
