Rising refinery capacity, strategic inventory filling, and flat domestic production resulted in China importing record volumes of crude oil last year, an average of 10.1 million bpd, up by 900,000 bpd from the 2018 average, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in an analysis on Monday. China continues to be the world’s largest importer of crude oil after surpassing the United States in 2017. This year, the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted Chinese fuel consumption and has upended previous estimates about Chinese crude oil imports, refinery operations, and domestic consumption. “The economic and transportation effects from this outbreak are still developing and will likely affect China’s crude oil imports, refinery runs, and domestic consumption through the second quarter of 2020,” the EIA said today. Last year, the majority of Chinese crude oil imports, or 55 percent, came from OPEC, the EIA analysis based on the China General Administration of […]