CHINA-ECONOMY: STRATEGIC OIL RESERVES
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A US satellite-imaging firm called Orbital Insight claims that Chinese inventories in May 2016, stood at 600 million barrels. James Crawford, said that for its Chinese analysis the firm went back to images taken from 2010 to 2014 and counted the number of oil storage tanks built and destroyed and came up with a figure of 2,100 storage tanks, far more than the 500 tanks in the industry standard database in TankTerminals.com. Orbital Insight’s estimate far exceeds the figure given in a rare glimpse of China’s oil supplies by its government. On Sept. 2,the state-owned Xinhua news agency reported that China had 287 million barrels of oil in strategic storage sites in eight cities as well as in commercial facilities at the beginning of the year. Started in 2004, the Chinese strategic stockpile would be enough to cover only 36 days of oil imports, Xinhua said, based on data from the China National Petroleum Corp.’s Research Institute of Economics and Technology. China’s goal is to have large enough strategic stockpiles to cover 100 days of imports, a target the government’s five-year plan said might not be completed by the 2020 goal.
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