China's Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemicals has not bought any Iranian crude this year, due to shipping issues and political sensitivities surrounding Iranian imports, a company executive said on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
The company processed about 10.87 million tonnes of crude oil, or 220,000 barrels per day, last year, 10 percent of which was from Iran, Ye Guohua, the company's chief financial officer, told reporters at an earnings briefing.
Last month Sinopec's chairman said that the company is looking to diversify its crude oil imports, following a sharp drop in its first-quarter purchases from Iran.
A contractual dispute between China's Unipec, the trading arm of Sinopec, and Iran's National Oil Company ended in February with a statement by the Chinese refiner that it was slashing its crude imports for 2012 by 10 to 20 percent from the previous year, depriving Tehran of as much as $2.4 billion in oil revenue.
After more than two months of wrangling over price and credit terms between Unipec and Iran's NIOC, the dispute was resolved thanks in part to the intervention of Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi during a visit to Beijing in February.
Data from Chinese customs released last month showed China's February crude imports from Iran, at some 290,000 barrels per day, had halved from the December level and were down 40 percent versus January and year-earlier rates.
The Chinese refiner, which supplies some 45 percent of the fuel needs of the world's second-largest oil user, plans to process 3.5 percent more crude oil this year than in 2011, with crude throughput planned at around 4.5 million bpd.
Edited by: S. Isayev