China’s oil demand is nearing a turning point as electric vehicles take a growing share of its vehicle market, the world’s largest.
The country has long been the thirstiest consumer of crude. China accounted for 16% of global demand in 2023, or 16.4 million barrels a day, up from around 9% in 2008. More significantly, China was the largest buyer of marginal barrels. During that span, it contributed to more than half the growth in global oil demand. Since a record consumption year in 2023, after the country emerged from strict zero-Covid policies, demand has slowed. Oil consumption is projected to rise a mere 0.8% year on year in 2024 and by an additional 1.3% in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency.
While China’s overall oil demand still appears stable, its composition is shifting gears rapidly. Gasoline and diesel demand seems to have peaked: China’s total demand for these transportation fuels in 2024 will be 3.6% lower than in 2021, according to IEA estimates.
China’s housing bust is partly to blame, as a slowdown in construction led to weaker demand for diesel used in machinery. But a bigger story comes from China’s rapid shift in personal transportation, and especially the rise of electric vehicles. More than half of the passenger cars sold in the country in recent months were new-energy vehicles, which includes plug-in hybrids, according to the China Passenger Car Association. Largely because of that trend, China’s gasoline demand in 2025 is expected to be 6.4% lower than the peak in 2021, according to IEA projections.
More new heavy-duty trucks in the country are also using liquefied natural gas instead of diesel. Diesel and gasoline accounted for 44% of China’s oil demand in 2024, down from 51% in 2018.
While transportation fuels are running out of road, China’s growing petrochemical sector has been gobbling up oil products. Consumption of naphtha, ethane and liquefied petroleum gas, all feedstocks for petrochemicals, has risen 59% between 2019 and 2024. But this boom may no longer be enough to compensate for the continued decline in diesel and gasoline demand as electric vehicles keep gaining ground in China.
China’s refining capacity surged by 42% to 18.5 million barrels a day from 2011 to 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That has translated into excess capacity, especially during the current economic downturn. Beijing has set a refining capacity cap of 20 million barrels a day, partly in an effort to weed out its inefficient smaller refineries.
This could be a double whammy for big, integrated oil companies. China imported 11.3 million barrels of oil a day in 2023, more than 10% of global production. Its structural decline in demand could hurt their upstream divisions through pressure on prices. Meanwhile, its excess refining capacity could then pinch the downstream margins of those supermajors. Those divisions have been a traditional financial counterweight during times of low oil prices.
Oil producers that rode the coattails of China’s economic boom could face a crude awakening.
Write to Jacky Wong at jacky.wong@wsj.com
