China mapped its industrial rise onto a single risk, seaborne oil under U.S.-policed chokepoints. At peak, 80% of crude arrived by tanker; the Malacca Strait is the throat. In a crisis, a blockade would aim to strangle the economy. 🧵
Beijing treated the problem as engineering. It locked down critical minerals and rare-earth refining so the magnet layer for wind turbines, motors, and batteries sits inside its control, quiet hardware for a sovereign grid, with refining share approaching 90%.
The state scaled domestic renewables and then electrified transport on top of that grid. Policy muscle, tax breaks, subsidies, R&D, license-plate priority, drove an EV stack that now produces 70% of global EVs and runs on 14M onshore chargers, bending oil demand before car ownership saturates.
Resilience extends into the gray zone. “Teapot” refineries absorb sanctioned crude from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, small, agile, harder to police, while vast storage fields are filled when prices sag, turning inventories into time buffers against maritime pressure.
Domestically, China drills deep despite complex geology. PetroChina and CNOOC are pouring billions into ultradeep fields like Tarim and offshore rigs, CNOOC’s 2025 capex alone tops ¥130B( $18 billion USD). Output has climbed 13% since 2018 to 4.3 mbd, but imports still cover 70% of demand and are projected to hit 11.18 mbd in 2025. Flattening has begun, but retreat remains uncertain.
The objective is operational immunity, oil-unblockable. Rewired flows, a grid decoupled from diesel, buffers in steel tanks, and demand shifting to electrons make energy policy double as wartime logistics; fleets lose leverage when the route, the stock, and the load all move inland.
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