China is now the world's greatest oil power

No, it's because oil is still transiting the strait. A select group of tankers has been bypassing the Iranian "blockade" and ferrying oil across for months now.

An estimated ~2–5 million barrels per day transit via dark transfers.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/05/us-secretl...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/dark-ship...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-is-using-an-irani...

It might be said that this article casts China as a "super capacitor" in that it can store and release massive quantities of oil at will.

It also has its own domestic oil production of 4.3 million barrels per day.

Oil producer != oil power. What matters is the ability for a government to routinely influence prices. The US government could, in theory, ban all exports or manually dictate production but we tend not to do that (yet). Our main government price-control lever comes from SPR releases, but we're nearly tapped out. China has no real legal restrictions on what its government can dictate except for what makes sense geopolitically, so at any moment it can make oil vastly cheaper or more expensive, even moreso than OPEC can by manipulating supply.

No, controlling supply isn't as important as controlling demand. If China wanted, we could all be paying 6, 8, 10 dollars a gallon right now causing real turmoil. Instead it's business as usual.

Not even close. 1) US has at least 4x lower oil reserves than China so it can't outlast China in a game of energy chicken, 2) US produces mostly light crude while almost all its refineries are for heavy crude so it can't even use the stuff it makes, 3) China has the ability to control its own industries like flipping a switch so they can halt oil-demanding (and refining) immediately to control 15% of the world's demand of oil which immediately impacts the entire world's price on oil, 4) they can get oil from Iran and Russia through the Yuan since everything you want is made in China so oil export controls don't work.

> This ability to turn oil demand on and off, ostensibly at low economic cost, allows the world’s biggest oil importer to move prices just as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) and its allies have long done through their control of half of global output.

This is not about production. You should read the article and not only the title.

China had the foresight to fill its petroleum reserves when prices were lower( so much so they raised prices just by that action) and can keep going for four more months with very little impact from the USA/Iran/Israel war. They simply raised gas prices to get consumers to stop driving ICE so much and moved its internal petrochemical industry (largest in world according to article) to replace Middle East imports and stop exporting (causing the mini crisis in neighbors who imported from China). The standoff situation in Middle East has to continue for four consecutive months before we see China having to take other measures.

Yes, the US still outproduces China in oil by nearly a factor of three. The actual meaning of the vague title is that China temporarily buffered world crude prices.

TFA notes that China controlled prices during the Iran/"Orange Idiot" war in three ways: (1) they had fortunately filled their storage during a recent price drop, (2) they restricted exports of China oil, and (3) domestic use "sharply" decreased.

The article concludes that this 3-pronged approach is "manageable", but not sustainable:

> But the Iran war has shown that, in practice, China can singlehandedly stabilise the global oil market over a period of many months. Leaders of the increasingly fractious oil cartel can only dream of doing the same. ■