By Amy Lv and Siyi Liu
(Reuters) – State oil giant PetroChina plans to begin trading metals used in the energy transition, according to the new team head, joining the global energy majors that are diversifying their portfolios into the commodities.
Richard Fu, a commodities and financial industry veteran of more than three decades, has joined PetroChina International (London) Co Ltd as trading manager, he said in a recent post on LinkedIn.
“I am honoured to start the green energy transition and minerals business for PetroChina, trading physical and paper copper, lithium, and others,” he wrote.
PetroChina, the listed arm of Asia’s top oil producer China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), did not respond to a request for comment.
Fu, who was previously head of commodities at the London branch of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, declined to comment further.
A person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as they are not authorised to speak to the media, said that in addition to lithium and copper, the new PetroChina unit may also look to trade nickel and consider entering markets in Europe for trading carbon and electricity.
China’s state oil giants have been looking to diversify their businesses, including internationally, as surging adoption of electric vehicles slows domestic oil demand growth.
Global energy traders and producers including U.S. major Exxon Mobil and Saudi Aramco have been diversifying into lithium in particular to capitalise on the shift to electrification and the energy transition.
Last year, Exxon announced plans to start producing lithium, used in EV batteries, by 2027.
Saudi Aramco and the United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) plan to extract lithium from brine in their oilfields, Reuters reported in March.
(Reporting by Amy Lv in Beijing and Aizhu Chen and Siyi Liu in Singapore; Editing by Tony Munroe, Kirsten Donovan)
