Chinese oil demand remains one of the key wild cards for market forecasters trying to assess the trajectory of global demand growth this year and beyond. Robust crude imports, including big surges in June and July, appear to support more bullish views of China for 2025. But the import numbers also seem to be running ahead of actual consumption in China, where demand for transport fuels like gasoline and diesel continues to soften. A deeper dive into the data suggests organic demand may indeed be slowing, while stockpiling accelerates amid growing geopolitical tensions and favorable oil prices. China’s oil imports in the first seven months of 2025 were up 2.8% year on year, or around 310,000 barrels per day, at nearly 11.3 million b/d. Imports of Iranian crude (via Malaysia) at around 1.4 million b/d — up about 180,000 b/d from a year ago — accounted for the biggest single share of the increase. Small independent refiners in Shandong stored US-sanctioned Iranian crude in onshore tanks in the second quarter as they entered lengthy maintenance periods amid sluggish domestic fuel demand. The Israel-Iran conflict in June sent China’s Iranian imports further soaring to 1.7 million b/d as buyers rushed to secure Iranian crude before potential output disruptions that never really materialized. With all that crude coming in, China’s commercial crude stocks — most of which Beijing considers strategic — rose to a record above 1.3 billion barrels in June, an 81 million bbl increase from January, Energy Intelligence estimates. That’s on top of the 286 million bbl estimated held in China’s official strategic reserves.
