China’s emergency oil reserves grow

China reported it added about 43 million barrels of crude to its strategic reserves between the middle of 2015 and early this year, in a rare release of such data by the world’s second-biggest oil user.

The statement posted on the website of the country’s National Bureau of Statistics is the first update the government has given on its reserves since December. The emergency stockpiles has been a source of speculation this year among analysts and traders, who rely on customs figures and infrequent construction updates to estimate how much of the country’s imports go into its strategic inventories, and for how long it will continue to fill them.

The reserves totaled 31.97 million tons as of early 2016, equivalent to about 234 million barrels, the statistics office said Friday. In December, it reported 26.1 million tons as of mid-2015, about 191 million barrels. The bureau named seven above-ground sites and one underground storage cavern utilized as of early 2016, as well as commercial storage tanks, unchanged from mid-2015.

“The expanded volumes indicate the government has possibly put more strategic reserves into commercial tanks,” said Amy Sun, an analyst with Shanghai-based commodities researcher ICIS-China. “The fact that the number of sites has remained at eight also indicates the government has been slow building these tanks, despite the persistent stockpiling momentum amid low oil prices.”

China has boosted its crude imports to a record 7.5 million barrels a day on average this year, at times overtaking the U.S. as the world’s largest purchaser of foreign oil. The buying binge, along with supply outages, helped crude prices recover from a 12-year low over the first half of the year.