> You can print money, but you can only ""print"" oil for a short time from reserves, which the US and China have been draining.

What's different between the two is that apparently China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves, despite no significant reduction in travel, and despite reducing its import demand by 1 OPEC.

It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.

Apparently the main reason they have started buying crude again is not for internal consumption as much as taking advantage of the massive crack spread in refined petroleum products (like diesel) which they export.

> It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.

From a distance, those look like pretty sound theories.

It's wild that the pols and talking heads in the US have been screeching about how "dangerous" China is since the 90s (I remember family members making crude jokes about why I should be learning Mandarin instead of Spanish in middle school) and, yet, here we are doing everything we can to hand them the reins of world power.

> China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves

I think the easiest explanation is that this probably isn't true. The US SPR is underground, it would be quite easy for China to manage its equivalent in secret, for whatever reasons.

The Chinese EV shift is real and significant, though.

China has slowed replenishing its reserves as it'd prefer to buy on dips. It's dipping in at times, not releasing barrels to the open market. https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/chi...

EVs are a minority in China outside of a few biggest cities.

> massive crack spread