Wednesday 10 June 2015

More on Those Chinese Oil Movements

Further to CU's piece of Monday, I have turned up some numbers on the extraordinary downturn in China's oil trade.

New York . Paris . Peckham . Beijing
This time last month it was being reported that China had become the world's biggest oil buyer.  For oil of all grades, the total of production plus net imports for 1st Qtr 2015 showed 7% growth over 2014; and for gasoline it was 9% up.  That's more than GDP growth alone could account for (if we believe any of the numbers at all, of course.)  

There was a lot of trade in gasoil (diesel) also, in both directions: March set a record for exports, after an export quota limit was removed.  Notwithstanding this, Chinese gasoil inventories grew significantly, suggesting that the very substantial net imports in this grade also were not wholly required for local consumption.

And then the collapse of which CU wrote.  Strange patterns of trade, eh ?  Still, we believe in free trade.  Mange-tout, mange-tout, the import-export business is a funny old game.

ND

5 comments:

dearieme said...

Is anything known about their storage capacity?

Anonymous said...

Is it linked to sabre rattling and cutlass wielding in the Sea of Japan?

Nick Drew said...

dearieme - the US EIA ( = Energy Information Administration, not to be confused with the OECD-linked IEA = International Energy Agency in Paris) is a fine repository of data, much of it openly available online - although you can bet their stuff on China is a tad less reliable than for many other countries. That said, a lot of (military) effort goes into figuring out storage capacity, most of which is really easy to assess from the air ... (trust me on this one)

have a look, e.g. http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/country.cfm?iso=CHN

I strongly commend the EIA, theyare the sort of agency one could wish all government bodies were like. (The IEA does good stuff, too, but is rather more political, almost avowedly so, and so there is spin on some of their output. And they charge for the really good stuff!)

Anon - have a look back at CU's original piece for another line of thought

maybe both are right !

CityUnslicker said...

China has an amazing deal with Russia, 40% discounts to market price. Russia is also finding it hard to get buyers for products due to western banks not playing with them.

The combo of the both will lead it to seems as if China is indeed exporting more and more oil products at the moment.

Nick Drew said...

money-laundering, then!