China’s oil reserves went up 20 percent in 2011

Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources has said the country discovered 1.37 billion tonnes of oil reserves in 2011, up 20.6 percent from a year earlier.

It is the ninth year for the country to see new oil reserves rise by over one billion tonnes since 1949, Xinhua quoted Xu Dachun, deputy head with the ministry’s mineral resource reserve department as saying in a conference Thursday.

Of the total, 1.17 billion tonnes — 85.5 percent — of oil reserves were discovered in five major oil deposits located in Ordos Basin in Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Tarim Basin and Junggar Basin in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, as well as Bohai Bay Basin in eastern China.

Each deposit was found with reserves over 100 million tonnes, Xu said.

China has increased efforts in oil and gas exploration over past years to meet the economy’s expanding energy demand and ease its reliance on imports.

Its energy consumption increased rapidly, making it a leading energy consumer in the world.

The country also discovered more reserves of natural gas and coalbed methane (CBM), a type of natural gas that can be extracted from coal beds, last year.

New reserves of natural gas increased by 29.6 percent year-on-year to hit about 766 billion cubic metres in 2011, Xu said.