With Oil Supply At Risk From Israel-Hamas War, What Is China’s Demand Outlook?

Global oil supply from several OPEC countries in the Middle East, perhaps all of them, remains contingent on whether the Israel-Hamas War widens out, and by how much. On the demand side of the oil price equation, uncertainty remains on the economic growth prospects of China, the world’s largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world since 2017, and before that the key driver of the broader commodities supercycle. The country’s extremely tightly-enforced ‘zero-Covid’ policy, which was relaxed only at the end of 2022,…