China’s recent move to digitally tag fuel cargoes to clamp down on the widespread practice of declaring crude purchases as fuel oil to evade taxes is already seen to be curbing demand for heavy Venezuelan Merey crude from teapot refiners in Shandong province, sources said Thursday. “We are not hearing many deals of Merey crude concluded recently, as it is no longer easy to manipulate the invoice,” said a source with Hengruide Petrochemical, an 800,000 mt/year (16,000 b/d) refinery in Shandong. A source with Huifeng Petrochemical, a 4.8 million mt/year refinery in the province, said it is not using any Merey crude this month, without specifying why. Last month, it processed 35,000 mt of the crude. There are around 54 teapot refineries in eastern Shandong province with a total crude distillation capacity of 113.55 million mt/year, according to Beijing-based energy information provider JYD Commodities […]