China National Petroleum Corporation

The Chinese already essentially control the oil fields in Iraq.

Basra is run by CNPC, PetroChina.

And If, in fact, the United States does not prevail in Iran, which I very much question, then what are the mullahs going to want? The mullahs are going to want to stay in power, and Beijing is going to be able to go to them and say, we have the turnkey solution for you to stay in power.

We can bring everything that you need to be able to do that.

This told Brussels and London, meaning the capital of the UK, Brussels, the capital of the European Commission, more than any communique about where two decades of energy self-harm had led.

On the sidelines, Gazprom, the Russian-owned oil and natural gas fossil fuels giant, and CNPC, the same thing for China, signed a memorandum on the power of Siberia to pipeline through Mongolia.

That pipeline will carry an enormous amount of gas.

In other words, they're making up for the gas they're no longer selling to the Europeans.

Right, so we're, we're familiar with countries that can increase or cut production and affect global oil prices, right? But we haven't really been familiar with a country that can throttle its demand in such a way that it actually has a massive impact on global prices.

And so, you know, what, what I know from this, I had, uh, some meetings over the summer where we had, uh, kind of Chatham House Rules discussions about this, and also a former chairman of Sinopec and CNPC, two of the big Chinese state-owned oil companies, wrote a article that published over the summer where he talks about the, the levers.

And first, there are a couple of levers which were really about just reducing purchasing and, and moving to domestic inventories, right?

Okay.

And then the other question I'm curious about is why.

Was China trying to protect its own supply and, you know, turn inward and say, "Well, we have all this domestic product we can use"? Was there a sort of, do you think, calculated international policy here by sort of helping the rest of the world in this moment?

So the former chairman of Sinopec, and CNPC says it was strategic, right? That to, to try to cut down on speculation and price gouging and those sorts of things.

You know, China had been buying a lot of oil in a previous period when the oil prices were cheaper to fill up reserves, and so the idea was to back off on that and wait for prices to, to come down.