By Bill Holland on November 17, 2009 3:04 PM

That didn't take long.

Only two and one-half hours after Devon Energy announced Monday morning that it would put it billions of dollars of Gulf of Mexico deepwater assets and some foreign fields up for sale to focus on US shale gas, the New York Times brought back the ghost of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation to haunt the story.

Under the headline "Devon Energy's Asset Sale May Draw China's Interest," the newspaper reports that CNOOC might be a logical bidder for Devon's Gulf properties.

Government-controlled CNOOC got a short, sharp lesson in US energy nationalism in 2005 when it bid $18.5 billion for California-based Unocal and its GOM fields, topping Chevron's bid by a few billion (back when billions with a "b" meant something).

Some members of Congress paraded to the floor to talk warn of a Chinese hijacking of valuable US resources, a theft of strategic US technology, of using American nuclear secrets to blast holes in the ocean floor looking for gas and oil.

After a few weeks of hearings in rooms thick with lobbyists for both sides, CNOOC took its billions and went home, Chevron bought Unocal and all was right with the world.

But apparently, CNOOC has never forgotten. If it really is still interested in doing business in the US (CNOOC already has JV's in Canada and recently bought a small slice of Statoil's Gulf operations), US lawmakers and public opinion may have done the Chinese an unintentional favor.

Instead of buying Unocal's leases and rigs in the $7 to $9/Mcf price environment of 2005, CNOOC could buy buying similar assets in the $5/Mcf neighborhood -- a 33% price break.

Buy low, sell high. That's showing 'em.