International Energy Cooperation Research

With the rising external oil dependence, it is urgent for China to guarantee its stable, affordable, reliable crude oil import in the world. Latin America with abundant energy resources has not only been regarded as a strategic alternative region for China to diversify its crude oil import, but also has been viewed as a potential market for China's oil companies to carry out go global strategy. In recent years, Sino-Latin America energy cooperation has made great breakthrough so that it is essential to summarize the experiences, characteristics of different cooperation models and assess opportunities and risks of the future cooperation.This paper contains six chapters that can be divided into three parts. The first part consists of the preface and Chapter Two, which includes a literature review on international energy cooperation studies and tries to explain China's energy cooperation practice in theory. In Latin American energy research, there are some hotly debated topics, such as resource nationalism, fiscal model in the oil & gas industry, contract types and political conflict on resource revenue distribution.Chapter Two explores the international cooperation theories from a multidisciplinary perspective. Combined with China's bilateral cooperation practice in energy fields across the world, this chapter studies the mechanism characteristics of China's energy cooperation and also emphasizes the case studies, such as Sino-Angola Model, Sino-Venezuela Model, and China's energy cooperation with Russia and Central Asian countries. In pursuit of the growing energy interest across various countries, Chinese companies employ different forms for energy cooperation:crude oil trade, technical service, joint development, infrastructure-building participation, loans for oil and bio-fuels technology joint research. The majority of forms still in primitive development phrase can hardly be defined as one mature pattern.By comparison with other Latin American countries, Sino-Venezuelan Model stands out as a unique representative example that can explain the dynamics of the two countries'oil cooperation from governmental and corporate perspectives. Sino-Venezuelan collaboration can be generalized as a fairly mature model, which could be defined like the following description:Sino-Venezuelan Cooperation Model is a plural collaboration pattern with energy as cooperation axis and extended to infrastructure, high-tech, agriculture and other fields under the inter-governmental institutionalized cooperative framework, which are financed by Chinese banks or oil companies in form of credit or investment, and Chinese participatory companies in this model will be repaid by Venezuelan crude oil.The second part includes Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Chapter Five, which researches the concrete problems arising in China's energy cooperation models with Latin America. This part uses comparative study methods to research the special traits of China's cooperation with Latin American countries. Sino-Venezuelan cooperation model is the main case study in this paper, aiming to academically explain institutional framework, implementation mechanism, cooperation effectiveness and potential risks of Sino-Venezuelan Cooperation Model. Chapter Four studies other countries'energy cooperation with Latin America such as U.S, India, Japan and Europe Union.Chapter Five analyzes the stake-holders in China's energy cooperation with Latin America. For example, the resource countries often adjusted the fiscal models in oil & gas industry for optimizing the fiscal revenues. Local communities are also an important social factor for achieving the sustainable cooperation. For Chinese oil companies, there is a fierce market competition in Latin America. International oil companies from US and Europe have played a dominate role in Latin America.Chapter Six is the third part. Based on the above analysis, this part puts forward the cooperation target in Sino-energy cooperation and summarizes some measures for avoiding cooperation risks. Under the current great transformation of oil & gas markets in Latin America, Chinese oil companies have entered in this region, beginning strategic operation and business growing in next few years. However, there are still some potential challenges for their assets and managerial integration with local and international cooperation partners. In order to cope with the relative complex commercial environment in Latin America, Chinese companies need improve learning capacity of localization and accumulate the expertise of human resource with the leverage of their capital strength. In fact, China's growing energy interest in Latin America is far beyond the performance of national oil companies. Therefore, it is urgent for China's related public agencies to establish inter-governmental policy dialogues and information exchange mechanisms with their counterparts from Latin American sides. It is also essential to explore the historical practice and tradition of oil investment dispute settlement in resources countries by strengthening the congressional diplomacy on oil& gas legislation issues.