Beijing’s greening act is Sinopec’s gain

摘要

Chinese president Xi Jinping’s pledge that China will achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 is increasingly being wielded as a stick to beat the country’s private-sector refners — part of a broader trend of reining in innovative private-sector frms. China’s private-sector oil companies have thrived in recent years, overcoming hurdles such as limits on crude imports and a ban on exporting oil products to become highly competitive suppliers to domestic fuel markets. But the sector’s dramatic growth last year sparked complaints by national champion Sinopec. Independent refners have been subjected to successive waves of tax and environmental audits alongside a push to limit their access to crude imports, and most of them cut refnery throughputs sharply last month as government inspectors toured their facilities.