China is becoming the world’s biggest crude oil importer. And it’s doing it fast. April was the month to remember, as it was the first time in history that this country got higher on the bar than the United States of America. According to Energy Aspects consultancy, this mostly happened due to the increased shipments of crude oil to China from Iran. It is considered to be Iran’s attempt to make better relations with China’s oil companies, and that is the only explanation for the huge discounts the get. The benefit for the Iranians is more and more investments made by the economic giant. There is a potential trouble for the world in this relationship, as Jim Hinton from OilPrice.com says. Because further deepening of the Chinese – Iranian love could give an enormous power to China, as they could hold ransom roughly speaking on the oil market. According to this, future oil businesses would be tightly connected to China and the South China Sea.
Although these trends are not permanent and they don’t mean that China is going to be crude oil import leader for long, this data shows that things are on the move. The Asian giant’s oil demands are constantly growing day by day. On the contrary, the united States have become depended from the overseas oil.
“China has been storing crude oil in the last period. They are above trends in four of the last months. It was inevitable. Stockpiling finally gave results” – said Colin Fenton, partner at Backlight Research.
Creating more and more refining capacity is a normal result when you have a seven percent economy growth per year. Every long term aspect goes in China’s favor. A statement from a senior trader in a Chinese brokers house says it all: “The world has and will have a lot of oil. We need and we will need more and more of it”.
In conclusion, we may say that China has become a major, perhaps the biggest player in the oil games, and no longer is a passive watcher.
