<\/p>\n
Russia remained China’s top oil supplier in March, data showed on Saturday, as refiners snapped up stranded Sokol shipments.<\/p>\n
China’s imports from Russia, including supplies via pipelines and sea-borne shipments, jumped 12.5% on the year to 10.81 million metric tons, or 2.55 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, according to data from the General Administration of Customs.<\/p>\n
That was quite close to the previous monthly record of 2.56 million bpd in June 2023.<\/p>\n
Seven Russian tankers under sanctions offloaded Sokol cargoes in Chinese ports in March, as Russia worked to clear a glut of stranded supply in the wake of tightened U.S. sanctions.<\/p>\n
More than 10 million barrels of the oil supplied by Sakhalin-1, a unit of Rosneft, had been floating in storage over the past three months amid payment difficulties and sanctions on shipping firms and vessels carrying the crude.<\/p>\n
Stockpiling of Russian crude for storage in strategic reserves by state-owned CNOOC also boosted imports from Russia.<\/p>\n
Data from consultancy Kpler forecast sea-borne shipments from Russia hitting a record high of 1.82 million bpd, including 440,000 bpd of Sokol and 967,000 bpd of ESPO.<\/p>\n
Russia was China’s top supplier throughout 2023, shipping 2.14 million bpd despite Western sanctions and a price cap following the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
In coordination with other OPEC+ members, Russia opted to roll forward a voluntary reduction in crude oil output of 300,000 bpd into the first quarter of the year to support energy prices.<\/p>\n
Imports from Saudi Arabia, previously China’s largest supplier, totalled 6.3 million tons in March, or 1.48 million bpd, down 29.3% on the same period last year.<\/p>\n
Riyadh has said it would extend its voluntary cut of 1 million bpd through the end of June, leaving its output at around 9 million bpd.<\/p>\n
The world’s top exporter kept the March official selling price of its flagship Arab Light to Asia at $1.50 over the Oman\/Dubai average as the Kingdom sought to secure market share.<\/p>\n
January-March imports from Malaysia, a trans-shipment point for sanctioned cargoes from Iran and Venezuela, soared 39.2% on the year to 13.7 million tons, or 3.23 million bpd.<\/p>\n
The data showed 375,296 tons of imports from Venezuela, following a rare shipment of 352,455 tons of Venezuelan crude in February amid a temporary relaxation of U.S. sanctions on Caracas. Sanctions were re-imposed from Thursday after the U.S. said President Nicolas Maduro had failed to meet his election commitments.<\/p>\n
Customs recorded no imports from Iran.<\/p>\n
Below lists imports from main suppliers with volumes in million metric tons and year-on-year percentage change calculations by Reuters:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(ton = 7.3 barrels for crude oil conversion)<\/p>\n
\u00a0(Reuters – Reporting by Andrew Hayley and Amy Lv; editing by David Evans and Shri Navaratnam)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n maritime professional<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Russia remained China’s top oil supplier in March, data showed on Saturday, as refiners snapped up stranded Sokol shipments. China’s imports from Russia, including supplies via pipelines and sea-borne shipments, jumped 12.5% on the year to 10.81 million metric tons, or 2.55 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, according to data from the General …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/42236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}