June 20, 2025
Iranian oil sales to China plummeted by a quarter in May, according to data from Vortexa Ltd., but still remained quite high when compared to most months since the US abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018—a far cry from the Trump pledge to stop all Iranian oil deliveries to China.
The accompanying chart shows the monthly figures for Iranian oil sales to China over the past three years. They show that the May export figure of just over 1.1 million barrels a day was greater than in two thirds of the last 36 months.
crude per day in May. That was a big drop—but, as the red line shows, it is
still much higher than what China usually buys from Iran and nowhere near
the Trump declared goal of reducing China’s Iranian oil imports to zero. For
further perspective, the green line shows Iran’s normal exports to the world
before sanctions. China now buys well over 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
Thus, the Trump Administration is nowhere near achieving—or even approaching—the goal of zero exports, as proclaimed in January by President Trump, or even the target of 100,000 barrels a day proclaimed a week later by Treasury Secretary Steven Bessent.
Still, it should be kept in mind that the latest figure of 1.1 million barrels a day is not even half of what Iran exported when it didn’t face sanctions, which was an average over two decades of 2.5 million barrels a day.
Emma Li, a senior analyst with Vortexa, listed four reasons why the May level of Chinese imports fell so much from the April level of around 1.5 million barrels a day—which was the highest figure for any month since Donald Trump re-imposed sanctions in 2018. She listed:
• Tighter enforcement of sanctions;
• Seasonal refinery maintenance in China, which will continue through July and reduces demand;
• The fact that China has full storage tanks given how much it imported in March and April, the two highest months for Iran imports in the last seven years; and
• Lower prices for Russian crude, meaning the Chinese likely replaced some Iranian crude with Russian crude.
It should be noted that the Vortexa figures for April and May are still preliminary; as more data come in, the numbers are frequently revised.
The numbers in the chart include imports of both crude and condensate. There is often confusion because OPEC only deals with crude oil and ignores condensate sales, even though condensate is for all practical purposes the same as crude.
China’s official trade figures show zero imports from Iran in recent years as it tries to pretend it is not trying to avoid the US sanctions. Much of the Iranian oil shipped to China is transferred from one tanker to another at sea and then invoiced as Malaysian crude. In some months, China’s published figures on oil imports from Malaysia exceed the figures published by Malaysia for its total exports.
