In January, China’s National Energy Administration said it was eyeing stable oil production of over 200 million tons in 2025. Two months later, oil production in the world’s largest importer of the commodity hit an all-time high of 4.6 million barrels daily, per official data. China is taking “Drill, baby, drill” to heart.
Oil prices may decline further this year as new production swells and demand remains capped by China’s faltering growth, the head of the International Energy Agency said.
While crude futures have recovered over the past two weeks to trade near $68 a barrel on London, they remain roughly 9% below levels traded before President Donald Trump announced a blizzard of tariffs on China and other nations on April 2.
The U.S. move to penalize China-built and China-owned vessels calling at U.S. ports could lead to an oil supertanker made in China and operated by a Chinese company facing a fee of up to $5.2 million per call at a U.S. port, shipbrokers have estimated.
The U.S. last week announced fees on vessel owners and operators of China based on net tonnage per U.S. voyage. The previous proposal was a per-port-entry fee of up to $1.5 million on Chinese-built vessels, and up to a $1 million per-port-entry fee on any vessel (Chinese-built or non-Chinese-built) for operators that have any Chinese-built vessels in their fleet or orderbook.
China slashed its imports of many U.S. energy and agricultural commodities in March amid intensifying trade and tariff tensions with the United States, which are set to further reduce Chinese purchases of American goods this month and in the coming months.
China’s LNG imports from the United States crashed to zero in March as China slapped tariffs on American LNG and other energy products, making these uneconomical for Chinese buyers.
Last year, U.S. LNG represented about 5% of China’s imports of the super-chilled fuel.
The March export numbers could be a glimpse into what’s coming, but not immediately. In fact, some analysts expect a slowdown in Chinese exports in the coming months while the dust from the tariffs settles. “Exports will likely weaken in coming months as the U.S. tariffs [have] skyrocketed,” Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, told CNBC. He added that “in the short term, I expect chaos in supply chains and potential shortage in the U.S. that may drive up inflation.”
At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at just over $65 per barrel, with West Texas Intermediate at $61.71 per barrel, after on Friday the Trump administration announced a tariff exemption for certain electronics and semiconductors. Optimism wavered this week, however, as Washington launched investigations into pharmaceutical and semiconductor imports in what the media reported was part of setting the stage for tariffs on these two groups of products. President Trump himself said semiconductors were on the line for tariffs.
At the heart of China’s energy strategy lies its ambitious, seven-year (2019-2025) domestic oil and gas production campaign launched by the National Energy Administration in response to growing energy security concerns. The results have been promising: since the campaign’s inception China has reversed a domestic production decline and increased output by approximately 480,000 barrels per day. However, the country’s dependency on foreign oil remains high, with imports filling more than 70% of Chinese demand.
The recent reiteration by Iraq Oil Ministry of a 7 million barrels per day (bpd) oil production target within the next five years has spurred activity among Chinese firms that continue to dominate the country’s oil and gas sector. As it stands, more than a third of all Iraq’s proven oil and gas reserves and over two-thirds of its current production are managed by Beijing’s companies, according to industry figures. This translates into Chinese companies having a combined direct share in around 24 billion barrels of reserves and responsibility for production of around 3.0 million bpd. The latest in the very long line of Beijing’s firms to benefit from its ongoing stealthy takeover of Iraq’s huge oil and gas assets is China Huanqiu Contracting & Engineering Company (HQC), which has signed a huge project management consultancy contract for the supergiant West Qurna 1 oilfield.
China’s biggest state-held energy firms are following the demand trends in the world’s top crude oil and natural gas importer.
After decades of growth, Chinese demand for transport fuels is peaking as electric vehicles and LNG-powered trucks are seizing market share from gasoline and diesel. But natural gas demand is only going up, and it’s expected to continue growing for decades.
The Chinese economy will also be key to oil market balances this year, as in any other year. Analysts are eager to see the direction of the economy in 2025 after the lackluster growth in 2024, when China barely hit its GDP growth target amid a series of hits and misses in key economic data points.