Shifting Sands: Saudi Arabia's Oil Moves East to China

Shifting Sands: Saudi Arabia's Oil Moves East to China

The pivotal year was 2009, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA). It was then that China consumed more energy than any other country in the world, even the U.S., prompting an expert at the IEA expert to proclaim "the start of a new age in the history of energy."
For Saudi Arabia, which has the world's largest oil reserves and is the world's largest oil exporter, that new age couldn’t begin fast enough. Over the past 10 years or so, the Kingdom had been forging closer trade ties with China, becoming its key source of oil. In 2009, Saudi oil exports to China reached one million barrels per day (bpd), or 20% of its total oil imports and nearly double the number of barrels it exported the previous year; in contrast, U.S. imports of Saudi oil fell to less than one million bpd in 2009 for the first time in over two decades.