China is now the world's greatest oil power | Hacker News Reader

China is now the world's greatest oil power

economist.com

56 pointsbookofjoe36 comments

The most fascinating thing about this is how oil futures markets were able to capture this while the media was endlessly blasting stories about oil shortages.

Anyone paying attention to oil prices since the start of the war has been confused about the total disconnect between oil future and the existential situation on the ground. Even the media seemed mystified by this.

Well, now we all know the answer.

No, it's because oil is still transiting the strait. A select group of tankers has been bypassing the Iranian "blockade" and ferrying oil across for months now.

> US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday that the American military continues to escort barrels through Hormuz, and that about 13 million barrels a day are leaving the Gulf — half through the strait and half via bypass pipelines. US Central Command said on Wednesday that since early May, it has helped about 500 million barrels of oil leave Hormuz, suggesting roughly 5.6 million barrels a day over the period.

https://gcaptain.com/hormuz-oil-shuttling-trade-is-picking-u...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/05/us-secretl...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/dark-ship...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-is-using-an-irani...

There’s also a landed pipeline that is able to carry oil out to the west

It's all of these. If you maintain any major export path, or decrease demand, prices rise far less than they would otherwise.

Adding in this chart: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/oil-producer-...

That doesn't fully explain it, the amount of oil making it through the strait is a small fraction (less than 25%) of the amount that normally flows through there.

Exports from the gulf are only down to 13 million barrels/day from 20 million barrels/day. Gulf exporters are not running at 25% capacity.

Right, but oil transiting the strait is down below 25% of its normal amount.

> No, it's because oil is still transiting the strait.

This Youtuber did a napkin math to show this effect, plus the land pipeline and other supply increases can't be the sole explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkA0bkb6ZO0

There was a sharp decrease in demand too, and China did it without domestic oil shortages

That author greatly overstates China’s role as the single savior and doesn't address the covert fleet of tankers doing daily blockade runs.

He (wrongly) attributes everything to China.

> attributes everything to China

aside from:

  petro-monarchs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh [...] Ministers in Washington and Tokyo [...] state-led rationing in poorer countries

as listed in the first paragraph.

Wrong article dude. I'm clearly replying to the video posted in the parent comment, not the submitted article

Very much my bad, I missed that context - apologies.

https://archive.ph/0BHPf

Isn't that pretty misleading? About the production that can be cranked up / lowered as per needs, so the US likely remains the biggest oil power.

Not even close. 1) US has at least 4x lower oil reserves than China so it can't outlast China in a game of energy chicken, 2) US produces mostly light crude while almost all its refineries are for heavy crude so it can't even use the stuff it makes, 3) China has the ability to control its own industries like flipping a switch so they can halt oil-demanding (and refining) immediately to control 15% of the world's demand of oil which immediately impacts the entire world's price on oil, 4) they can get oil from Iran and Russia through the Yuan since everything you want is made in China so oil export controls don't work.

very interesting! So US refineries that can handle heavy crude are unable to handle light crude?

It's not that they are unable to entirely, it's that they are unable to economically. If you're paying more to refine your oil than what it costs to sell/use it, you're taking money away from your industries that depend on oil. Eventually the businesses would go bankrupt. Since we have a "free market", the market doesn't want to lose money, so it will run at a shortage with high prices, or stop running entirely (whole refineries can shutter due to losses). We saw this in practice during the 70s when OPEC forced a shortage. We are still vulnerable to the same thing.

The same shortages seen in the 70's would have already happened this year due to the Straight of Hormuz - except China saved the whole world from shortages by cutting its own imports of oil by 50%. Their massive drawdown created a buffer in the world oil market that everyone else pulled from. This is why China's oil reserve and non-OPEC imports make them the most powerful country in the world now. They effectively exist in a separate oil system with plenty of capacity for themselves, while we remain reliant on OPEC.

In researching this question, 40% of the refineries in the U.S. can process light crude efficiently.

They all can refine it, but the more technically adept refineries that specialize in processing heavy, sulfur-soured crude do not run efficiently with lighter grades.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2026/04/05/debunking-a-...

No, controlling supply isn't as important as controlling demand. If China wanted, we could all be paying 6, 8, 10 dollars a gallon right now causing real turmoil. Instead it's business as usual.

It might be said that this article casts China as a "super capacitor" in that it can store and release massive quantities of oil at will.

It also has its own domestic oil production of 4.3 million barrels per day.

Yes and they seem good at this, too. News reports are that they started stockpiling in January at the latest in prevision of a conflict in Iran that did start right at the end of February.

They started stockpiling in 2024. The estimate is that they had 1.4 billion barrels by the time the Iran war started, and they're down to 1.2 billion now. (Nobody knows for sure, though.) Meanwhile the US has 304 million barrels left in our reserves, but there's a (disputed) operational minimum around 225 million, where draw slows down and the caverns start to suffer damage. (That's about 90 days at current draw rates. Also, this is a loan program, where oil needs to be "repaid" with interest starting in November, so that's going to affect prices too.)

Is the crux of this article just that the Chinese oil reserve is 2x the capacity of the US oil reserve?

Is there anything more to it than that?

They were also able to drastically cut their own internal demand and external sales/shipments (the article mentions jet fuel to other Asian nations).

This was possible because their economic planning is centralized.

4x. The crux is that they can flip a switch to change global oil supply, be highly resistant to embargos, and are no longer subject to OPEC (through Iran & Russian oil traded in Yuan). They can now change global oil prices at will and resist attacks on their energy imports.

Which makes sense. The US is a net oil exporter -- in a strategic emergency the US will still have access to oil. China will want to have a much larger buffer, since its economy requires oil from other countries.

Oil producer != oil power. What matters is the ability for a government to routinely influence prices. The US government could, in theory, ban all exports or manually dictate production but we tend not to do that (yet). Our main government price-control lever comes from SPR releases, but we're nearly tapped out. China has no real legal restrictions on what its government can dictate except for what makes sense geopolitically, so at any moment it can make oil vastly cheaper or more expensive, even moreso than OPEC can by manipulating supply.

Reminder PRC refines MORE oil than US.

US produces more oil, but PRC massive SPR = PRC functionally a larger supplier by being able to release more, at drop of hat, than US aggregate supply lever [drilling + spr]. PRC simply storing a fuckload of oil - SPR seems enough to buffer large global disruption for months = PRC gains huge pricing power.

PRC electrifying only increases their oil swing buyer leverage - they are not going to let their billions in oil infra and built out SPR to the waste. Electrification frees up refinery surplus for export and additional price control as SPR buffer / time increases. If they can backstop regional disruptions i.e. 5-10mbd per day like in Iran for few month they're functionally a "producer" with +/- $50 USD per barrel vote.

Important to note this not temporary, this permanent leverage as long as PRC has world's largest oil refining capacity and largest SPR.

PRC also has electrification and domestic coal to petchem stack, i.e. if oil over $70, PRC gets permanent discount on industrial inputs. Right now PRC has 30% discount, using coal to do job of oil. This another drag producer power ability on top of PRC renewable wiping demand - renewable export supply lever. Ultimately upstream oil producers are not selling barrels to consumers, they're selling finished products (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel - energy), if PRC simply stores enough buffer, and have massive refining and have massive petchem, massive electrification to displace domestic demand, and massive renewable export - and it is important to recognize scale of all these categories in PRC are massive - then PRC actually has massive oil power leverage. Maybe even the greatest, because functionally they are the greatest supplier for everyday markets, including conflicts / disruptions that does not empty their SPR.

China = clicks nowadays I guess?

The US produces more oil products than anyone else by a large margin [1] and extracts more than anyone else [2].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6 [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/crude-oil-producti...

> This ability to turn oil demand on and off, ostensibly at low economic cost, allows the world’s biggest oil importer to move prices just as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) and its allies have long done through their control of half of global output.

This is not about production. You should read the article and not only the title.

does decreasing demand raise prices?

No, it lowers prices... which is what happened (effectively) versus expectations.

Maybe you should accept 'greatest oil power' as fact?

It's this one publications opinion. At best.

And it's essentially unheard of.

Yes, the US still outproduces China in oil by nearly a factor of three. The actual meaning of the vague title is that China temporarily buffered world crude prices.

TFA notes that China controlled prices during the Iran/"Orange Idiot" war in three ways: (1) they had fortunately filled their storage during a recent price drop, (2) they restricted exports of China oil, and (3) domestic use "sharply" decreased.

The article concludes that this 3-pronged approach is "manageable", but not sustainable:

> But the Iran war has shown that, in practice, China can singlehandedly stabilise the global oil market over a period of many months. Leaders of the increasingly fractious oil cartel can only dream of doing the same. ■

China had the foresight to fill its petroleum reserves when prices were lower( so much so they raised prices just by that action) and can keep going for four more months with very little impact from the USA/Iran/Israel war. They simply raised gas prices to get consumers to stop driving ICE so much and moved its internal petrochemical industry (largest in world according to article) to replace Middle East imports and stop exporting (causing the mini crisis in neighbors who imported from China). The standoff situation in Middle East has to continue for four consecutive months before we see China having to take other measures.

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