Judging from the number of cars on the streets in Beijing, a passerby might think the advent of $120-per-barrel oil is going unnoticed in China, the world’s second-largest consumer of crude.
In fact higher prices are already impacting China’s demand for oil. But there’s a caveat: experts say that China’s crude imports could actually increase because of events in the Middle East, at least in the near term.
The reason is that China buys a lot of foreign crude in an effort to fill its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a secretive project that will secure stockpiles of 85m tonnes of crude by 2020, or roughly 595m barrels—enough to last the country three months in an emergency.
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