{"id":38895,"date":"2026-06-11T11:58:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/38895\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:58:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:58:18","slug":"japan-taps-reserves-and-new-suppliers-to-beat-the-oil-blockade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/38895\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan Taps Reserves and New Suppliers to Beat the Oil Blockade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite the Hormuz crisis, Japan has secured the same volumes of oil imports for July as it did a year ago, as it is boosting imports from producers not dependent on the Strait to deliver their crude, sources familiar with the procurement plans told Kyodo News<\/a> on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Resource-poor Japan is one of the biggest energy importers globally and relied on the Middle East for as much as 95% of its oil imports before the war broke out.<\/p>\n

Most of the oil came from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar. Of these Middle Eastern supplies, about 70% typically arrived in Japan on tankers traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

Japan in April imported the lowest volume of crude oil from the Middle East on record<\/a>, dating back to 1979, as the Iran war and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz choked supply from the region.<\/p>\n

With traffic at the chokepoint still slowed to a trickle at 90% lower volumes compared to before March 2026, Japan has turned to suppliers, including the United States, Azerbaijan, South Sudan, and Russia\u2019s Sakhalin oil supply<\/a>, which was never sanctioned because of the Japanese dependence on it.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as the war choked supply from the Middle East, Japan began\u00a0releasing oil stocks<\/a>\u00a0from national reserves at the end of March, as part of the IEA-coordinated record-high release of 400 million barrels of oil and fuel. Japan is releasing a total of 80 million barrels of oil stocks, including 54 million barrels of crude and 26 million barrels of oil products as part of the IEA’s 400-million-barrel release.<\/p>\n

The ongoing stocks release, which is Japan\u2019s biggest, is helping domestic refiners increase throughput<\/a>. So is alternative supply from producers outside the Middle East, including the U.S., and rare cargoes from Azerbaijan<\/a>\u00a0and Latin America.<\/p>\n

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com<\/p>\n

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite the Hormuz crisis, Japan has secured the same volumes of oil imports for July as it did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28,451,1710,776,8,449,2741,7350,446,21834],"class_list":["post-38895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-azerbaijan","tag-crude-oil","tag-energy-security","tag-iea","tag-japan","tag-middle-east","tag-oil-imports","tag-sakhalin","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-strategic-reserves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}