PRESIDENT Hu Jintao specialises in a shy, distant smile. He wore it on Tuesday when he was in Perth, presiding with Premier Alan Carpenter over two events to announce deals to export 20 million tonnes of the West’s natural gas and untold amounts of iron ore to fuel his rapidly growing economy.

By Thursday, President Hu was in Sydney, still wearing his reserved smile, as he joined Prime Minister John Howard in presiding over announcements of three more resource deals. One of them, Woodside’s deal to sell PetroChina up to $45 billion of gas, is the biggest single export deal ever landed by an Australian company.

Imagine how rapidly Australia’s economy would grow if we could persuade President Hu to visit every month!

Add to that the Federal Government clearing the way for Russia to import Australian uranium, and you might get the impression that the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum summit has brought more action in resource deals than it has on any of the things the leaders came here to discuss.

Such an impression would be wrong. None of these deals owed anything to APEC; it was just that the presidential visits made APEC week a good time to announce them.

The two big ones were both about supplying liquefied natural gas to PetroChina, China’s biggest energy company.

First, Shell agreed to sell its share of the still undeveloped Gorgon gas field, 1 million tonnes a year over the next 20 years, for a total price estimated at $7.2 billion. Two days later, that was trumped by Woodside’s agreement to sell 2 to 3 million tonnes a year for the next 15 years from the similarly undeveloped Browse gas field in the waters far north of Broome.

But both deals were necessarily tentative, since as yet, neither project is certain to be developed.

The Browse consortium involves the same partners as the North-West Shelf, but in a different configuration.

Woodside owns 50 per cent, with BHP Billiton, BP, Chevron and Shell sharing the rest. At Gorgon, Chevron owns 50 per cent, and ExxonMobil and Shell share the other half.

Neither consortium has yet approved the investment of the billions of dollars required to develop them.

In the background were the smaller deals: two joint ventures between Gindalbie Metals and China’s Anshan Iron & Steel (Ansteel) to develop the proposed Karara magnetite mine and Mungada hematite mine inland from Geraldton, and a $750 million investment by five Chinese state-owned enterprises in Yilgarn Infrastructure’s proposal to build an iron ore port in Oakajee on the WA coast.

Find More Other News : Company, Exploration, Mine Trade & Market, Mining Top News, Oil & Gas, Petroleum