how much oil does china get from venezuela

China currently gets only a small share of its total oil imports from Venezuela, but it buys a very large share of Venezuela’s exported oil. Recent estimates suggest Venezuelan crude makes up about 4–5% of China’s total oil imports, while in many months China has taken well over half of Venezuela’s oil exports.

Big picture

• China is the world’s largest crude importer, so even a few percentage points of its imports represent substantial volumes of oil.

• Since tougher U.S. sanctions pushed other buyers away, Venezuela has increasingly relied on China as its main export outlet and financial lifeline.

How much oil, roughly?

• Analysts and recent reporting describe Venezuelan crude as accounting for about 4–5% of China’s total annual oil imports in recent years.

• In volume terms, one detailed 2025 export snapshot shows Venezuela shipping roughly 600,000+ barrels per day (bpd) of crude and fuel to China in a single month, with about 613,000 bpd of crude and around 133,000 bpd of fuel oil primarily going to China.

Share of Venezuela’s exports

• For Venezuela, China is far more important: between 2023 and 2025, China absorbed about 55% to as high as 80% of Venezuela’s oil exports in many months.

• More recent commentary continues to describe China as Venezuela’s largest oil buyer , underscoring how dependent Caracas has become on that market.

Why it matters now

• Because Venezuelan barrels are a small slice of China’s diversified energy mix, disruptions to Venezuelan supply tend not to threaten China’s overall energy security in the short term.

• Politically and strategically, however, control over or disruption of Venezuelan oil flows is seen as a lever in U.S.–China relations, since it targets a key revenue stream for Venezuela that mainly runs through Chinese buyers.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.