China's Gulf oil imports are closing in on their pre-war high as Hormuz disruptions ease

China's oil imports from the Gulf are on pace to top 5 million barrels a day this month, edging back toward the 5.6 million barrel level they held just before a US-Israel war on Iran upended the region's shipping lanes in February.

The rebound has been fast. Imports from the Gulf climbed from 3.5 million barrels a day in September, with shipments from the wider Middle East up 25.7 percent month on month to 13.8 million tonnes. Saudi Arabia and Iraq, China's two largest non-sanctioned suppliers before the war, have led the recovery, with Saudi arrivals alone expected to top 2 million barrels a day in October, well above the 1.6 million barrel daily average Riyadh shipped to China in 2025.

The disruption behind the slump traces back to February 28, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, triggering a war that saw Iran's Revolutionary Guard block and threaten passage through the Strait of Hormuz, board merchant vessels and lay sea mines in the waterway. A ceasefire reached in April and a memorandum of understanding signed in June briefly calmed the situation, but fighting resumed in July when Iranian forces struck shipping they judged to be defying their demands. China's crude imports sank to around 7.8 million barrels a day by May, their lowest in nearly a decade, as tankers avoided the strait.

Rather than chase a spiking spot market, Chinese refiners leaned on the country's reserves, drawing down roughly 147 million barrels of stockpiles built up during an earlier period of record-pace buying. Estimates of China's remaining crude inventories vary, from around 1.09 billion barrels by one tracking firm's count to 1.18 billion by another, both marking the lowest levels in well over a year. With imports now recovering and more cargoes expected from November, refiners have begun slowing those drawdowns to rebuild the buffer rather than keep spending it down.

The flows are not back to normal everywhere. Very large crude carriers remain in tight supply, and ship-to-ship transfers used to work around the still-contested Strait of Hormuz continue to delay some cargoes, even as the headline volumes climb back toward where they stood before the war began.