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Chinese demand for Canadian crude oil shipped through the Port of Vancouver has dried up in 2019.

David Huntley, a professor emeritus in physics at Simon Fraser University who monitors tanker traffic at Burnaby’s Westridge terminal, said that so far this year there had been only three tankers that loaded crude oil from the terminal and none went to China.

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This followed a record year for China, where it bought 6.56 million barrels of crude (12 tanker loads), or almost one-third of all the crude shipped out of B.C. in 2018. According to Port of Vancouver records, China imported crude from B.C. every year between 2008 and 2018, except 2016 and 2017.

Huntley, via email, told Postmedia News “my interpretation is that a significant amount of oil was sent to China near the end of 2018 when the price was very low, and it stopped the moment the Alberta Premier curtailed production and the price returned to normal.”