Sinopec has obediently followed Beijing's recent orders to its three big energy companies: go forth and bring me oil. Addax Petroleum, which Sinopec will buy for $7.3bn, pumps some 137,000 barrels of oil a day in West Africa and Kurdistan. State ownership will provide Sinopec with political cover in these unstable regions – and the delicious irony that, among the big powers, China has become the first to gorge itself on a slice of the potentially 40bn barrels of oil in northern Iraq.

Still, such is China's thirst for energy that Sinopec has paid a bubble price for Europe's second-biggest independent producer. Its offer is just shy of the all-time high that Addax's stock price reached last summer. As chief executive Jean Claude Gandur controls 40 per cent of Addax's shares, this cannot have been a tough decision. From Sinopec's point of view, after including some $1.5bn of net debt, it has bought Addax's reserves for almost $20 per barrel of oil equivalent – a peak valuation. Still, Addax has a good track record of converting potential reserves into actual ones. Allow for this, and the price drops to about $5 per boe of proven and probable reserves – close to what BP paid for TNK when it re-entered Russia in 2003, albeit facing quite different political risks.

At a 47 premium to Addax's undisturbed share price, and China's largest outward oil investment to date, the deal is the latest to excite investor expectations in the independent sector. Britain's Centrica recently bought a 22 per cent stake in Venture for an 85 per cent premium. Heritage Oil is meanwhile merging with Turkey's Genel in Kurdistan. Some see a trend – although each deal is as much defined by its own characteristics, and only some are gushers. Dubai's ENOC, for example, this month disappointed many with the “modest premium” it plans to pay for the almost half of Dragon Oil it did not already own.