An oil tanker is being unloaded at a terminal in Yantai, East China's Shandong Province on May 23, 2022. China imported 171 million tons of crude oil in the first four months of the year, down 4.8 percent, latest official data showed. Photo: VCG

The US House of Representatives passed a highly politically driven bill on Thursday aimed at banning crude oil trade with China, once again in the name of national security, as the country deals with high inflation.

Experts said that the ban, if implemented, would have no real consequences for China's oil supply, given the diversified sources and the very limited share of the US oil in the Chinese market, and warned that it could further complicate China-US trade relations, which have already been clouded by various export restriction policies imposed by the US in recent years.

The US House of Representatives approved legislation on Thursday to ban the sale and export of crude oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China, UPI reported on Thursday. The measure still faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

The bill specifically bars the Department of Energy from selling petroleum products from the reserve to any entity that is under the "ownership, control or influence" of the Chinese Communist Party, the report said. The department must also require as a condition of the sale of crude oil from the reserve that it not then be exported to China.

The ban came as the US government has been struggling to deal with the country's ongoing energy shortage.

The Biden administration released 180 million barrels of oil last year from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a bid to curb gasoline prices.

Experts said the US ban on oil trading, which makes up a very small proportion of China's overall oil imports, will have little impact on Chinese energy supply.

China is the world's largest crude oil importer and the second largest oil consumer, with a 72 percent dependence on foreign crude oil.

The top five exporters of crude oil to China include Russia and Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, while the US lags far behind in tenth place, data with the General Administration of Customs shows.

"The restrictions on crude oil exports are more of a gesture, but have no real meaning, since the US exports very little crude oil to China anyway," Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Friday.

China's imports of US crude oil are also limited compared with several other countries.

Data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that the top five destinations of US crude oil exports by percentage share in 2021 were India, making up 14 percent, followed by 12 percent to South Korea, while Canada and the Netherlands both had 10 percent shares. China ranked fifth with a 9 percent share.

China has no interest in buying US crude oil, but did so partially because of the provisions of the China-US phase one deal, of which oil is one of the important parts of the agreement, He Weiwen, a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times on Friday.

On the one hand, the US does not want to sell oil to China, but at the same time, it complains about its trade deficit with China, which doesn't make sense, He said, referring to the capricious US move in energy exports to China.

In recent years, US export restrictions targeting China, its major trading partner, have come one after another, in fields ranging from chips to technology. This will only end up hurting the US as it threatens global free trade and multilateralism, while the world badly needs economic recovery in the post-COVID era, experts said.

The US has adopted a series of restrictive trade and investment measures as well as protectionist practices against China, which have harmed the interests of businesses and people on both sides, Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao said in a video meeting with Craig Allen, who chairs the US-China Business Council, on Friday.

China hopes that the US side will take a correct view of the opportunities that China's development brings to the US and the world, and follow the direction specified by the two heads of state to push China-US economic and trade relations back on track at an early date, Wang said.