OREANDA-NEWS. February 06, 2012. The first director of China's National Energy Administration (NEA) recently said that China had successfully completed its Phase-I project of oil strategic reserve.

 The first 4 oil reserve bases in Zhenhai, Zhoushan, Huangdao and Dalian have been put into operation with total reserve being around 14 million tons. The reserve is equivalent to commercial oil reserve capacity combining the nation's crude oil import in over 10 days and domestic oil import in 21 days. In other words, China's current oil reserve capacity is equivalent to import in 30 days.

The country performed very well in its energy reserve Phase-I project. Phase-II of oil strategic reserve goes on smoothly and is expected to be fully completed this year. By then, the country's total oil reserve capacity may hit 274 million barrels (equivalent to 37.53 million tons). In addition, the state plans to finish all work for strategic oil reserve by 2020, building around 500 million tons of oil reserve, roughly equal to oil import in 90 days. By then, China will rank No. 2 in the world in terms of oil reserve.

Experts believe that domestic crude oil self-supporting capacity has reached the bottleneck phase while crude oil import increases drastically. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that China's oil dependency is likely to hit 80%.