China’s NOCs look to the future

The three state-controlled heavyweights are gearing up to announce 2020 earnings, with attention focused on addressing near-term challenges and opportunities

Markets are optimistic about the financial performance of China’s ‘big three’ NOCs—PetroChina, Sinopec and Cnooc—given the continued recovery in both China’s oil and gas demand and international energy prices in the final quarter of 2020 compared with the lows seen earlier in the year. China’s crude consumption in the final three months of last year climbed to 14.9mn bl/d, unchanged from a year earlier but up by more than a quarter from Q1 2020, when mobility was severely curtailed by lockdowns, according to the IEA. China’s gas demand, meanwhile, surged in the year’s final quarter as a rebound in domestic industrial activity coincided with freezing weather that drove up heating requirements