Subject: Re: As Albaby says...
Great. We're going to be like this now? That's cool if you want to play like that.

Just trying to use a little humor. Obviously it didn't land the way I intended - sorry about that.

But you take my point. The tariffs didn't push India to change their position on Russian oil imports. They imported more than ever, and they're still importing as much oil as they can from the non-OFAC barred Russian oil companies. They're just trying to use the reduction in imports from 1.8 mbpd to 1.2 mbpd (which is still 1.2 mbpd more than they were importing from Russia before the war) that they had to swallow because of the sanctions as an argument to get tariff relief - even though the former, and not the latter, was the cause of the reduction.

And to tie it back to Venezuela, this is an illustration of what I'm talking about. Even if China did lose access to about .4-.6 mbpd in Venezuelan sanctioned oil (again, not a certainty), that's a small enough amount that it can be backfilled by Russian oil. Because they now have a bunch of oil they used to be sending to India that now can't go there, but can go to China (who is a large enough economy with its own financial system that's been engineered to allow non-OFAC compliant transactions to work).

So, the oil just sloshes around in the system. Venezuelan oil still goes to China, and now more of it will go to India (as noted in the article I linked a few posts ago). The Russia oil that used to go to India will go to China. China will likely also increase some imports from Canada - if we do end up trying to replace Canadian heavy oil with Venezuelan oil at our Gulf refineries, that will pull forward the adoption time frame of the new TMX pipeline, which was not expected to operate at full capacity until 2028 but may reach that point in the near term, which would bring another 0.2 mbpd to the West Coast.

Combine that with the 70 million barrels already on the water to China, and China's build up of reserves over the last few months to protect themselves from this type of scenario, and this isn't going to have much of an impact on China. Especially since, apparently, we're going to continue to sell that oil to China.