[shin_lao]

You will always find a report that goes in the way of the narrative you want to push. The goal of these reports is to poke holes and build scenarios. It doesn't mean it's going to happen. This article elevates a niche bottleneck into a headline risk.

- Sulfur matters but we have many substitutes, stockpiles, and alternative supply chains.

- 20% of global oil passes through it, but the US doesn't depend on it, will hurt China disproportionally more. While oil is globally priced, it has different benchmarks.

- The "6% traceability" stat likely reflects formal mapping, not actual operational ignorance.

[maxglute]

Meanwhile MENA oil continues to flow to PRC, so it doesn't hurt PRC more. High oil prices hurt US disproportionately more for the simple reason oil is higher % of US energy mix (~40% US vs 20% for PRC), and due to refinery mismatch, US not oil independent and needs to pay spot for imports, i.e. Canadian crude. It also it hurts US productive partners more by inflating input prices, which PRC circumvents with continued cheap RU energy and more significantly coal to petchem stacks that makes PRC coal much cheaper industrial input than oil after $70/80 barrels, lower than every oil benchmark. Like huge segments of PRC industry literally just gained 20-30% and growing discount on inputs vs essentially every other industrial power that relies on crude for inputs, i.e. basically everyone else without PRC's contingency coal stack got considerably more fucked than PRC.

Until even greater disruption that meaningful takes barrels from PRC to the point of degrading mainland, i.e. after SPR runs dry, PRC suffers significantly less than US while gaining more industrial competitiveness. But, at current level of disruption, i.e. still relatively lack of, PRC wins on essentially every domain.