By Rhod Mackenzie
Despite the apparent slowdown in the recovery of the Chinese oil economy, ironically, it needs more and more. Thus, according to Oil Price, in June, China's oil imports grew in annual terms, i.е. compared to June 2022, by almost half (45.3%)! Beijing bought an average of 12.67 million barrels of oil daily in the first summer month. The huge growth in imports is due to a low initial base - last summer the PRC vigorously fought the coronavirus with lockdowns and severe restrictions, and energy demand was much lower than now.
In addition to the lifting of the Covid-19 zero-tolerance policy and severe restrictions at the end of 2022, the lifting of restrictions on independent refineries (refineries), which are called “dummies” in China, played an important role in such a strong jump in oil imports. By the way, there are 204 refineries in the country, and the capacity of 31 exceeds 10 million tons per year.
The restrictions on oil imports by "teapots" had a strong impact on the decrease in China's total oil imports and were explained by the desire of the authorities to take control of independent oil refiners, who began to play too large a role in the Chinese "oil industry", according to Beijing. On top of that, "dummies" often violated the law: they evaded paying taxes, engaged in smuggling, did not comply with the requirements to reduce harmful emissions into the atmosphere, etc. By the way, the fight against the "dummies" in many ways resembled the just ended (at least, the authorities themselves announced this) a purge in the Chinese IT sector.
Along with the increase in oil imports, China, the fifth largest oil producer in the world, also increased its production to 4.3 million barrels per day.
Beijing also set a record for Russian oil purchases in the first half of this year. In January-June, it imported an average of 2.13 million barrels of oil from Russia every day. Growth in annual terms amounted to 44%!
This article originally appeared in Russian at expert.ru