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Project Dory Monitoring 18 August 2017
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Fire put out at major PetroChina refinery in Dalian
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
A fire that broke out on Thursday at state oil major PetroChina's plant in northeastern China, one of the country's largest refineries, has been put out with no reported casualties, state media reported. -
N.Korea Still Selling Seafood to China
Aug 18, 2017 | The Chosun Ilbo
By Lee Kil-seong.
The North continues to export seafood to China despite a blanket ban under UN sanctions by trading it on the high seas before it is labeled as Chinese, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday. -
North Korean marine products disappear from markets in China due to sanctions
Aug 18, 2017 | Daily NK
By Lee Sang Yong |
UNSC Resolution 2371 is beginning to have an impact on China’s northeastern provinces (Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang), hubs of bilateral trade between China and North Korea. -
Trump adviser Bannon says U.S. in economic war with China: media
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
The United States is in an economic war with China, U.S President Donald Trump's chief political strategist has said, warning Washington is losing the fight but is about to hit China hard over unfair trade practices. -
CNOOC Ships Last Module for Yamal LNG
Aug 18, 2017 | Maritime Executive
The engineering division of Chinese oil and gas firm CNOOC has shipped the last of 36 core process modules for the Yamal LNG project. The modules are the core components of Yamal's liquefaction trains, which will compress and chill the gas for shipment.
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Fire put out at major PetroChina refinery in Dalian
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) - A fire that broke out on Thursday at state oil major PetroChina's plant in northeastern China, one of the country's largest refineries, has been put out with no reported casualties, state media reported.
The fire came just two months after the Dalian refinery finished a planned major maintenance.
More than 600 firefighters extinguished the blaze at the plant's 1.4 million-tonnes-per-annum catalytic cracker just after 9:00 p.m. (1300 GMT), and stayed on the scene to make sure equipment at the refinery remained cool, state broadcaster CCTV said on Friday.
The inferno, the latest industrial incident to rock the port city of Dalian, started at around 6:40 p.m. due to a broken seal in a feed pump, CCTV said.
The refinery in Liaoning province and owned by PetroChina Dalian Petrochemical Corp, has three crude distillation units with total processing capacity of 410,000 barrels per day of crude oil. Catalytic crackers typically produce gasoline.
A spokesperson for PetroChina said the feedstock equipment connected to the catalytic cracker has been suspended. The other units in the refinery were not affected.
The unit that caught fire produces all oil products but is geared towards gasoline, according to a Singapore based trader.
Firefighters battled huge flames and billowing smoke, pictures on the People's Daily twitter account showed.
Local government officials were at the site on Thursday evening as an investigation began into the cause of the inferno, state radio reported on its social media blog.
Environmental inspectors are carrying out checks but said containment pools installed at the refinery had prevented pollutants from entering coastal waters. Nearby air quality monitoring stations showed no signs of abnormal emissions in the area, CCTV reported.
The plant's crude processing operations were not affected, although there may be a small reduction in output at the gas separation unit as a result of the incident, a refinery source said.
In 2013, an explosion at the refinery left two people injured and two missing. [bit.ly/2v4vloW]
Dalian was also the site of one of China's biggest known oil spills, when a pipeline blast put at least hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the sea in July 2010. [bit.ly/2uTYTGq]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-petrochina-fire-idUSKCN1AX1II
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N.Korea Still Selling Seafood to China
Aug 18, 2017 | The Chosun Ilbo
By Lee Kil-seong.
The North continues to export seafood to China despite a blanket ban under UN sanctions by trading it on the high seas before it is labeled as Chinese, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday.
RFA quoted a source in China as saying that "maritime markets" crop up at night on the West Sea, where Chinese trawlers buy fish and other seafood from North Korean vessels.
The Chinese fishermen then sell the products in China labeled as domestic catch. The source said that this has been going on for a long time.
Another source who travels back and forth by ferry from Incheon to Dandong and Dalian, China, told RFA, "When you stand on the deck of the ferry at night, you can see many fishing boasts that flicker their lights. Those are signals exchanged by North Korean and Chinese vessels to engage in illicit trade on the open seas."
It is apparently an open secret among Chinese fishermen that it is cheaper to pay U.S. dollars for North Korean fish and other seafood than it is to hire Chinese crew.
Chinese fishermen pay for the fuel of North Korean fishing boats and buy their catches on the high seas for dollars. One North Korea expert in Beijing said, "As long as this type of illicit trade is allowed to continue, you can say there is a glaring hole in the latest sanctions against North Korea."
According to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, China officially imported $192.5 million worth of North Korean fish and seafood products last year, up 75.9 percent compared to 2015 and making up 7.8 percent of bilateral trade, up from 4.4 percent in 2015.
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2017/08/18/2017081801249.html
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North Korean marine products disappear from markets in China due to sanctions
Aug 18, 2017 | Daily NK
By Lee Sang Yong |
UNSC Resolution 2371 is beginning to have an impact on China’s northeastern provinces (Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang), hubs of bilateral trade between China and North Korea.
A number of Chinese factories in Jilin Province are refusing to hire new North Korean workers (on August 11, some Chinese factories announced their intention to stop employing North Korean workers), and North Korean fisheries products have been disappearing from markets in Yanji city.
The Chinese authorities have announced their intention to ban imports of minerals including coal, iron ore, lead and lead ore, and maritime products from North Korea starting from August 15. However, the volume of imports of North Korean fisheries products had already been in steady decline prior to the announcement.
"Now you can hardly find any North Korean fisheries products in the markets of Yanji city. This must be due to the new UNSC resolution which included a ban on North Korean fisheries products," a source familiar with North Korean affairs in China told Daily NK on August 14.
According to a report by Yonhap News Agency, Dandong city (Liaoning Province) has intensified inspections of North Korean fisheries products passing through customs due to the new sanctions. In addition, the Dandong city authorities closed the fishing season around the Dong river from May to September, leading to a shortage of North Korean fisheries products in China. A similar turn of events has occurred in Yanji city (Jilin Province) following the adoption of UNSC Resolution 2371 on August 6.
According to the source, North Korean fisheries products imported into Yanji have been more popular than Chinese products because they are high quality but relatively cheaper.
"At the markets in Yanji city, North Korean fisheries products have been very popular among Chinese customers, but now they’re expensive or absent," the source said.
As the sanctions on North Korean maritime products have been implemented, Chinese enterprises engaged in the sector and the North Korean authorities are all expected to suffer losses. In particular, the Chinese enterprises in Hunchun City, which have been processing imported North Korean fisheries products, are likely to face significant issues.
The Hunchun government announced in January that sales of processed marine products in 2016 increased by 46.4% compared to the same period the year before, and the profits realized for processed marine products increased by 47%. As the business of processing marine products prospered in Hunchun, the volume of exports by North Korea’s fisheries industry also increased. The North Korean authorities ramped up export volumes of fisheries products because they were not included in the previous list of UNSC sanctions.
A source in North Hamgyong Province estimated that the Rason region of North Korea, adjacent to Hunchun in China, which has been earning large amounts of foreign currency due to the export boom in fisheries products, is set to face catastrophic losses under the new UNSC sanctions.
The ban on fisheries products may well impact the North Korean military authorities, he said, as the export of fisheries products was a primary source of foreign currency for them.
"Because there are many Chinese enterprises deeply engaged with the North Korean military, it is highly likely that they will continue to do business illegally. The key focus of the new sanctions against the North must therefore lie in stamping out such activities," he noted.https://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=14678&cataId=nk01500
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Trump adviser Bannon says U.S. in economic war with China: media
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
(Reuters) - The United States is in an economic war with China, U.S President Donald Trump's chief political strategist has said, warning Washington is losing the fight but is about to hit China hard over unfair trade practices.
"We're at economic war with China," Steve Bannon told U.S. news site prospect.org in an interview published in Wednesday.
"It's in all their literature. They're not shy about saying what they're doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it's gonna be them if we go down this path," he was quoted as saying.
"If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she had seen the report, and reiterated the essence of the China-U.S. trade relationship is mutually beneficial.
"In reality, China and the United States' long term cooperation has brought about real benefits for both countries' peoples, any unbiased person will clearly see this fact," she told a daily news briefing in Beijing.
"We have also said before, a trade war has no future. A trade war does not serve the interests of any party, as fighting a trade war will not produce a winner. We hope that relevant parties can stop viewing issues of the 21st century with a 19th- or 20th-century mentality."
Bannon said the United States would use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from U.S. corporations doing business in China and follow up with complaints against steel and aluminum dumping, according to prospect.org.
On Monday, Trump authorized an inquiry into China's alleged theft of intellectual property in the first direct trade measure by his administration against Beijing.
"We're going to run the tables on these guys. We've come to the conclusion that they're in an economic war and they're crushing us," said Bannon, who acknowledged he was battling trade doves within the U.S. administration.
He said there was no reason to go soft on China in order to get Beijing's support over North Korea because he believed China would do little more to rein in Pyongyang.
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear build-up with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the Korean peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote, prospect.org reported.
In contrast to Trump's threat of "fire and fury" against North Korea, Bannon said: "There’s no military solution, forget it."
"Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about ..."
Asked about any connection between his economic nationalism and white nationalism in the United States, and in particular the racist violence in Charlottesville, Bannon said: "Ethno-nationalism — it's losers. It's a fringe element."
"I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more. These guys are a collection of clowns."
However, Bannon, who formerly led the right-wing website Breitbart, said focusing on race would help the Republicans politically.
"The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-bannon-idUSKCN1AX0DE
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CNOOC Ships Last Module for Yamal LNG
Aug 18, 2017 | Maritime Executive
The engineering division of Chinese oil and gas firm CNOOC has shipped the last of 36 core process modules for the Yamal LNG project. The modules are the core components of Yamal's liquefaction trains, which will compress and chill the gas for shipment.
It was the largest foreign order in CNOOC's history. It was not, however, the only module order for the project – Technip has also been building giant equipment racks for Yamal, and a total of 150 units will be shipped by the time the plant is complete.
Yamal LNG, operated by Novatek and financed by a consortium of Russian, French and Chinese backers, is a greenfield development in the Russian far north. Project partner Total says that the construction environment is extremely challenging due to the remote location and to the Arctic winter weather. The access channel is frozen eight months of the year, and temperatures can fall as low as -60 F. Given the difficulties of constructing a complex liquefaction plant under these circumstances, the project partners chose to build the main components in sections, each weighing up to 8,000 tonnes, and then ship them to the site on heavy lift ships. Two icebreaking module carriers were built for the purpose of carrying the units via the Northern Sea Route in winter conditions.
Yamal LNG is slated for completion in 2019, and will ship its first product by the end of 2017. When fully built out, it will export 16.5 million tonnes per annum of LNG to European and Asian markets.
Yamal LNG's location on the Kara Sea requires the use of Russia's ice-clogged Northern Sea Route to export the product. Shipping company Sovcomflot has commissioned a fleet of the world's first icebreaking LNG carriers to accomplish the mission, and the first of these, the Christophe de Margerie, has just completed her first commercial transit of the route. The Margerie took on a load of LNG in Snovhit, Norway and departed on July 27, bound for Boryeong, South Korea. AIS data from August 16 showed her approaching her destination.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/cnooc-ships-last-module-for-yamal-lng
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