China is now illegally drilling for oil within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone, ramping up Beijing’s campaign of aggression against the island’s sovereignty. Over the past several years, China has been intensifying performative military displays in the waters around the island, but drilling within Taiwan’s territory is a new development that could signal a new, ultra-aggressive political era for the One China policy.
Over the last two months, “at least 12 oil and gas vessels and permanent structures were detected inside Taiwan’s [exclusive economic zone] – including one within 50km of the restricted-waters border of the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands – as well as several steel supports for fixed offshore drilling platforms, called jackets,” reports the Guardian. This infrastructure belongs to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of the world’s largest oil and gas outfits.
A report from the Washington-based think tank the Jamestown Foundation warns that this newly installed equipment could serve as the means for “a full range of coercion, blockade, bombardment and/or invasion scenarios” on the part of China against Pratas or Taiwan.
This newest tactic marks a notable intensification of what experts refer to as China’s “gray-zone” warfare strategy in the waters around Taiwan. “Gray-zone” tactics refer to China’s pattern of ramping up conflict and pushing boundaries with Taiwan for its own strategic benefit without escalating to actual fighting. Over the past several years, China has been increasingly challenging the status quo in the Taiwan Straight, as a means of repeatedly “contesting Taipei and its allies’ readiness to respond to crises, and actively testing the boundaries of state coercive behavior below the threshold of a conventional confrontation,” according to an analysis from the Global Taiwan Institute.
China contends that Taiwan – recognized as a sovereign nation by most global governing bodies – belongs to China as a part of the nation’s One China policy, which seeks to reclaim territories that the Chinese believe have wrongfully defected. China also lays claim to the entirety of the South China Sea, even though international courts in The Hague have ruled against this assertion, and in reality, six countries – China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei – have legitimate claims to parts of these waters.
In order to advance its soft-launch military campaign against Taiwan and the South China Sea, Beijing is attacking the island’s Achilles heel – its energy industry. Taiwan is extremely dependent on energy imports to sustain its national energy security, rendering it extremely vulnerable to Chinese blockades and in dire need of any oil and gas assets within its exclusive economic zone.
In May of this 2025, Taiwan closed down its last nuclear power plant, making good on a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) policy promise formulated in the wake of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and public disfavor of nuclear energy. Now, as a result, Taiwan imports nearly 100% of its energy supplies, principally in the form of oil and gas.
International security experts have long been warning of intensified conflict between China and Taiwan, and the extreme fragility of Taiwan’s energy systems. Earlier this year, Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) conducted 26 different wargames to model exactly how a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could play out. While the scenarios vary broadly, there is one clear thread through all of them – the prognosis is grim.
In all 26 scenarios, Taiwan runs out of natural gas in approximately ten days. Natural gas is followed by coal and oil, which run out at 7 weeks and 20 weeks, respectively. “Total electricity production might be reduced to 20 percent of pre-blockade electricity levels,” the Center’s report finds.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com