Chinese refiners slashed their crude runs to the lowest level since August 2022 as China has reduced refinery utilization and slashed crude imports as oil prices soar amid the Iran war.
Crude throughput at Chinese refineries slumped by 5.8% in April from a year earlier, to about 13.3 million barrels per day (bpd), according to official data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics published on Monday.
That’s the lowest oil throughput since August 2022, when China was still under severe Covid-related lockdowns.
The average refinery utilization rate slumped to 63.59%, down by 4.7 percentage points from a year earlier, and down by 5.13 percentage points compared to March, per data from Chinese consultancy Oilchem cited by Reuters.
Demand destruction from higher oil prices and export restrictions in March and April meant that China didn’t draw on its quite large crude inventories, and stocks of gasoline and diesel actually rose, analysts tell Reuters.
China has slashed crude oil imports to the lowest since 2022, also easing the upward pressure on physical crude prices. Many refiners decided to undergo spring maintenance a bit earlier than planned. Others are in scheduled maintenance, preparing for the peak summer season.
China’s buying behavior in recent weeks suggests that the world’s top crude oil importer is slashing imports, and refiners with smaller stock buffers have slashed run rates.
China’s crude oil imports slumped by 20%, or by 2.4 million barrels per day, in April from a year earlier. Imports were pegged by official data at 9.25 million bpd in April 2026, which was the lowest level since July 2022.
Last month, Chinese state-owned oil giants were even reselling crude for May loadings in a rare move from the majors that had cut refinery rates in response to soaring oil prices and constrained crude supply from the Middle East.
The “Chinese miracle”, as Vortexa’s Chief Economist David Wech described the plummeting Chinese crude imports and the rising onshore inventories, has been one of the pillars of the market’s efforts at rebalancing amid the worst oil supply crisis in history.
The Chinese and U.S. buffers that have stopped oil futures prices from rallying to record highs could vanish before the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which puts the market in a “race against time,” Morgan Stanley warned earlier this month.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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