WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- China National Offshore Oil Corp. confirmed that it submitted a request to the U.S. government to review a takeover of Canadian energy company Nexen.
CNOOC spokesman Peter Hunt confirmed to Bloomberg News that a voluntary request was made to the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment to examine its July offer of $15 billion for Nexen Inc.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, as chairman of the committee, needs to review the deal because Nexen has operations in the U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, called on Geithner to block the Nexen deal.
"Giving valuable American resources away to wealthy multinational corporations is wasteful but giving valuable American resources away to a foreign government is far worse," Markey stated in a July letter to the treasury secretary.
Plans to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the southern U.S. coast are slow to develop. Canadian officials have since expressed interest in sending oil to China with the help of pipelines to western ports.