A Study On Energy Cooperation In Northeast Asia

Energy is the essential material foundation for economy growth and society development. With the development of economy globalization, energy security is with the characters of global, open and interdependent so that it is difficult to ensure the energy security by any own counties. It needs to carry out the regional or even world energy cooperation to ensure the energy security. Compared with world energy cooperation, the regional energy cooperation is more practical since it has the similar history and culture as well as close geography in the region.Now, EU has carried out the energy cooperation on the basic of Energy Chart, USA emphasized the importance of energy cooperation with other regions especially with the neighboring countries in the new energy strategy. But, compared with other regions of the word, energy cooperation in Northeast Asia region developed lower due to lacks of trust in polity among regional countries and undeveloped cooperation mechanism. The paper gets the conclusion that it is imperative to promote the energy cooperation in Northeast Asia, which is the best way to ensure the Northeast Asian energy security and to seek the mutual development by the analysis of the characters of energy reserves, production and consumption, as well as the energy cooperation tendency in Northeast Asia region. After analyzing to advantages and obstacles for energy cooperation, the paper proposes that the strategy scheme and countermeasures to impel the energy cooperation in Northeast Asia, especially points out that China plays an important role in promoting Energy cooperation in Northeast Asia and proposes the measures that China should take for that.This Paper was divided into four parts.The first part: It begins with the analysis to foundation, cooperation tendency of energy cooperation in Northeast Asia. It makes use of world energy statistic and outlook data by BP and IEA (International Energy Agency) to analyze the energy consumption condition and trend in Northeast Asia. So, the consumption characters are concluded as follows: the large energy consumption with high growth rate, high import dependency on oversea oil, main energy consumption structure as coal and oil. This paper analyzes the challenges to the energy security in Northeast Asia, which is import dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the sea transportation security problem, Asian Premium and environment problems. After this, the paper points out it is necessary to carry out energy cooperation in Northeast Asia, that is absolutely necessarily to take concrete measures to solve or mitigate at least the harm caused by above mentioned problems. It needs to take cross-border countermeasures and policies to set up cooperation mechanism and frame, and to carry out regional cooperation.The second part: the paper analyzes the conditions and significance of regional energy cooperation and points out the complementarily in the aspects of capital, technology and labor, which need to flow in region and require the energy cooperation among the countries in region .At the same time, the cooperation talk has been initiated and the special geography advantage of Russian, China, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and DPRK,which provide the practical cooperation foundation. Secondly, the paper analyzes the economic effect resulted from energy cooperation in Northeast Asia after concluding the obstacles, such as lack of mutual trust due to the complex political problems, the serious competition for getting energy. Then it points out the views that the energy cooperation could enhance energy security as well as obtains the common economic benefits, promote cross-bonder investment trade and technology cooperation, which would drive the economy cooperation in Northeast Asia. The economic and political significance are summarized as follows: Firstly, to realize mutual economic development and exert complementarily advantages; secondly, to integrate oil purchasing power to low the import cost and maintain the economic benefit for oil import countries; thirdly, to impel the region economic cooperation and sustainable development; fourthly, to ameliorate Northeast Asia regional security.The third part: the paper puts forward the energy cooperation strategy goal, scheme and countermeasures for impelling energy cooperation in Northeast Asia based on introduction of current energy cooperation situation, which is with bilateral energy cooperation mainly and significances brought by multilateral energy cooperation .In this part, author emphasize the strategy envisions to realize multilateral energy cooperation in Northeast Asia as follows: firstly, to set up the cooperation order, that is Northeast Asian energy chart ,whose effects are :(a)to provide law base for investor ,to encourage their investment confidence and investment in energy infrastructure, common energy stockpiling ,new and reproducible energy development;(b) to provide multilateral protocol with law boundary to promote long-term energy cooperation, define the rights and obligations of regional members to impel establishment of transparent and fair energy market ;(c) to promote the transfer and cooperation of the advanced energy saving and environmentally sound technologies to improve energy efficiency and ensure energy usage security .Secondly ,to carry out energy cooperation in key areas : (a),to set up the common energy stockpiling with the beginning of commercial cooperation stockpiling ,which could make full use of the spare capacity in stock and refine for some countries to save cost and improve economy interests .For the long-term perspective, it need to set up strategy cooperation stockpiling to enlarge general scale of energy stockpiling in Northeast Asia ; (b)to set up Northeast Asia energy market ; (c)to set up Northeast Asia Development Bank ,which is to finance the building of energy infrastructure and common energy stockpiling ; (d)to realize the energy development and utilization to promote multilateral Energy Cooperation .Finally ,to set up multilateral cooperation organization, namely , Northeast Asia energy community. Furthermore, the paper puts forwards the countermeasures for impelling Northeast energy cooperation as follows: on the aspect of government, the countries should enhance the mutual trust to achieve agreement, exert complementarily advantages and promote technology cooperation; at the same time, on the aspect of enterprises, to encourage to exert internal regional enterprise cooperation as the strategy countermeasures to promote Northeast energy cooperation.The fourth part: this paper sets forth the importance that China takes an important role in promoting energy cooperation. On one hand, as the big energy consumption county, China should strengthen the cooperation with Russian to mitigate the pressure of energy supply and realize the energy import diversity; on the other hand, to avoid unfriendly competition, to realize multi-win and to drive economy development. This paper puts forward the views as follows:(a) China should make energy diversity on the base of bilateral energy cooperation;(b) to accelerate the establishment of oil stockpiling to improve common oil stockpiling in Northeast Asia;(c) to improve energy utilization efficiency to ensure the energy usage security ;(d) to promote oil future market and set up Northeast Asian pricing center.