CNOOC Ltd, China's biggest offshore oil and gas producer, said third-quarter sales fell, reflecting flat crude output and a decline in the value of the US dollar.

Sales fell 1.8 percent to 18.3 billion yuan, CNOOC said yesterday. Oil output rose 0.3 percent from a year earlier to 373,287 barrels a day. Oil and gas production climbed 3.8 percent to the equivalent of 476,937 barrels of oil a day in the three months ended September.

CNOOC Chairman Fu Chengyu plans to boost output from fields off China's coast to meet the nation's rising energy demand. The oil producer intends to more than double the size of the Bohai Bay field, making it China's second biggest, in the next five to six years.

"We had basically flat sales in the third quarter of this year because our crude output was flat and the US dollar depreciated," Chief Financial Officer Yang Hua said yesterday.

The US dollar has fallen 5.12 percent against the yuan in the past year. Output from fields off China's coast was little changed at 417,482 barrels a day. Production from overseas jumped 43 percent to 59,455 barrels a day, Beijing-based CNOOC said.

In another development, China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, Asia's biggest refiner, posted a loss of 5.3 billion yuan from processing oil in the third quarter as crude costs rose and the government capped fuel prices.

Surging crude oil prices, inflated by "political, financial and regional" factors, will have a "relatively higher" impact on Sinopec, as the Beijing-based company is known, Chief Financial Officer Dai Houliang said yesterday.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 10/31/2007 page13)