China's "One Belt, One Road" initiative aims to boost regional connectivity and development. What are the implications of this for energy security in the region?
Dr Jeremy Carl
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
Director of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy
"One Belt, One Road" has the potential to boost energy security in the Asia-Pacific by strengthening China’s links to major producing areas such as Central Asia and the Middle East and to major consumers such as India. While China obviously wishes to build this infrastructure for its own strategic ends, everyone can potentially benefit by increased connectivity.
This is particularly true with respect to the natural gas market, which remains highly fragmented and inefficient, though there will certainly be benefits to the oil and coal market as well. Developing more robust infrastructure is especially important to safeguard supply routes for oil and natural gas. By providing for greater connectivity to the region as a whole, China and other countries linked to its infrastructure network will become less dependent on the stability of any one link in their oil and natural gas supply chain.
On the export side, if China and India partner to bolster the port and pipeline infrastructure on India’s Eastern coast, this could substantially improve India’s energy security situation, particularly with respect to coal and natural gas.
Dr Ariel Cohen
Director, Center for Energy,
Natural Resources and Geopolitics (CENRG) and
Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council
The new “Silk Road”, which stretches from Chinese coastal production facilities to Europe through Central Asia and Russia, will boost the economy of the transit regions significantly by providing millions of jobs and improving security in Central Asia. The implementation of this mega-project will also allow energy resources to flow to new consumers in the developing regions and set the foundation for a unified energy system. This system will make the participating countries more secure in terms of energy consumption and will serve as a “safety net” for regional economic development, stability and prosperity.
However, it is important that all regional stakeholders are willing to participate in investment, ownership and management of such a unified energy system and that no one country emerges as an "energy hegemon". The electric power generation and distribution in such a system should be managed by two separate companies and the equity in those can be shared by both state and private/publicly traded companies. China can improve its security, interdependence and cooperation with the West, including the US, by allowing Western firms to participate in this undertaking.
Dr Patrick Ho
Deputy Chairman and Secretary General
China Energy Fund Committee
Home to 600 million people without access to electricity, Asia is in a dire need to accelerate energy infrastructure development to provide affordable and reliable energy services that are fundamental to poverty reduction and economic growth.
By cultivating energy cooperation with regional developing countries and leveraging on its rich experiences in energy project development and operation, China and its "One Belt One Road” strategy will likely generate profound influences in carrying forward regional energy development to a next high level and thus creating more development possibilities for communities as well as individuals.
In doing so, this will also generate positive influences to regional confidence building and will pave the way for the possibility of having a coherent energy cooperation mechanism in Asia to direct regional energy policy making and emergency response coordination.