China’s Energy Policy and South-South Cooperation? A Comparative Study between Sino-Brazilian and Sino-Argentine Energy Policy 2000-2010

This dissertation studies China’s energy policy since the “Go Out” strategy became the PRC’s “overarching national strategy”, having been put forward for the first time in the 5th Plenum of the 15th CPC Central Committee in October 2000 –despite having been de facto implemented since 1993. It focuses on the evolution of the PRC’s petroleum and biofuels policy from 2000 to 2010 and on the impact it has had on Brazilian and Argentine energy policy and exports of energy resources to China. The study adopts an asymmetrical interdependent perspective within a South-South Cooperation analytical framework to argue that the role these countries have played as suppliers of fossil energy resources (petroleum) to the PRC throughout the observed period –role that can be defined as having been relatively modest in spite of having ranked as China’s top South American oil suppliers for most of it– has considerable potential to become significantly more relevant in the future, through the diversification of their energy exports to China based on the combination of fossil fuels and renewable energy resources (biofuels). As regards the former, the study highlights the game-changing discovery of enormous ultra deep-water off-shore reserves in Brazil in 2007 and 2010 (Tupi-Lula and Libra, respectively, which are already turning Brazil into a major oil exporter) and of the gigantic shale energy formation of Vaca Muerta in Argentina in 2010. Regarding the latter, both Brazil and Argentina are leading producers and exporters of biofuels (sugar cane- based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel, respectively). The remarkable progress that the PRC has made in the energy sectors of the analyzed countries –and in Latin America in general, showing the “asymmetry of attention” paid by China and the USA to the region is emphasized. The research highlights the increasing importance that renewable energy resources are having in Chinese energy policy, due to both energy security and environmental concerns. It argues that the addition of clean energy resources to their exports to the PRC would benefit Brazil and Argentina by allowing them to diversify not only their export baskets (by adding more products to their exports to China, with the plus that these would have value added) and export destinations (adding the growing Chinese market while simultaneously reducing these countries’ dependence on traditional biofuel destinations such as the EU and the USA), but would also have positive effects for China’s fuel supply mix, contributing to make China’s transition to a low-carbon economy (or, at least, lower-carbon) shorter – as well as positive spillovers in their industrial structures