The Minister of Energy Khaled al-Faleh, met recently a delegation of China National Nuclear Company (CNNC), one of the leading state owned nuclear group.
China is craving to export any kind of nuclear related technology and prove to the world that its industry and engineering can compete with Korea, Japan and Russia.
The Chinese company is going through an economic and strategic crisis in the domestic nuclear power market, since the development of nuclear has been reduced, to the large production of electricity from the conventional power. Its competitor CGN took recently the decision to reduce the electricity production from Hongyanhe 2 in Liaoning province.
The investment from the Chinese supply chain is now a burden for the government looking for an escape to export billion of USD of equipment. Like any other sectors, we expect China to export very competitive equipment to support the state owned enterprise business.
The chairman of CNNC, Sun Qin, has the mission to push forward this expansion, and the recent meeting in Saudi Arabia is a great opportunity to play with China to increase the competition with Rosatom. In return, the Saudi are looking for a maximum of technology transfer from China, in the field of nuclear engineering, uranium exploration and civil engineering. Both parts signed a MOU in the field of human resources training, which is the first step to assess the level of the local engineers and the motivation from the vendor to get the Saudi’s business.
