Electric truck sales are booming in China, displacing not only petroleum product demand but also threatening to begin eroding LNG demand for heavy-duty transportation.
Chinese electric truck sales soared to a record high last month while full-year 2025 sales of battery-powered heavy-duty vehicles jumped threefold from a year earlier, to more than 230,000 vehicles, per data from CVNews, a local commercial vehicle-tracking platform, cited by Bloomberg.
LNG truck sales also continue to rise, denting diesel and gasoline demand, which analysts say has already peaked. Transportation accounts for about 50% of China’s LNG demand, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.
Yet, the electric truck sales are now approaching 20% of all truck sales in China, signaling that LNG, the fuel displacing diesel, could, in turn, come under threat from the electric truck boom.
China subsidizes electric truck sales, boosting demand, but the funding for the program to incentivize the scrapping of old diesel vehicles could be reduced this year.
Nevertheless, China appears to favor e-trucks over LNG-fueled trucks in a faster shift to zero-emission heavy-vehicle transportation, according to BNEF.
Half of China’s truck sales are set to be electric vehicles by 2028, according to the top executive of Chinese battery giant CATL, which holds more than a third of the global EV battery market.
More than a dozen truck manufacturers in China are using a CATL standardized battery on about 30 electric truck models, CATL’s chairman and chief executive officer, Robin Zeng, told the Financial Times in an interview last year.
If Zeng’s forecast of the surge in Chinese electric truck sales pans out, this would lead to a major disruption in the Chinese and global automotive and fuel markets.
Chinese fuel demand is already leveling off due to the surge in electric passenger car sales and the growing number of LNG-powered trucks. If electric trucks become as dominant as CATL expects, demand could begin to drop faster than previously thought.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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