With North Korea testing a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the US has renewed pressure on China to stop crude oil shipments to Pyongyang. China has gone along with a series of punitive UN measures against its Cold War-era ally, but has resisted calls to shut the ‘Sino-DPRK Friendship Oil Pipeline’
How Much Oil does China Supply?
No one really knows how much oil China ships to the rogue state. China has not published data on its oil exports to the North since 2014. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that North Korea consumes only a small amount: around 15,000 barrels a day. The majority of that likely comes from China. According to UN customs data, China sent 6,000 barrels a day of oil products to North Korea in 2016, according to AFP
Across the Yalu River
Crude oil flows across the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Dandong to the Sinuiju oil depot in North Korea through the 30-km-long ‘Sino-DPRK Friendship Oil Pipeline’. The pipeline went into operation in 1975 with a capacity of three million tonnes per year, but the China National Petroleum Corporation said in 2015 that the annual capacity stood at 520,000 tonnes
The majority of that oil, if not all of it, is used by the military and Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programme, AFP quotes Wang Peng, a Korea expert at China’s Charhar Institute, as saying. China fears that stopping the flow of energy could trigger the collapse of the North’s government or provoke a violent response from Pyongyang, according to experts.