Does Renminbi internationalization matter for petroleum security in China? Evidence from a disaggregate analysis

As the largest oil consumer and sixth largest oil producer in the world, China's growing oil import is a premise to its energy security concerns. For China, petroleum security means supply security. The paper disaggregates petroleum security into three dimensions (domestic petroleum price—DOP, petroleum supply—PS and petroleum reserve—PR) and examines the impact of Renminbi internationalization (RMBI) on these dimensions based on linear auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) procedure, and monthly data spanning from 2011M01 to 2022M03. The empirical results reveal evidence of long run equilibrium relationship between PR, PS and RMBI. On the long run and short run dynamics, RMBI is inversely related to DOP both in the short run and long run, but the impact is less than proportionately. However, RMBI and PS co‐move in the short run with 0.24% margin. In the same vein, RMBI and PR co‐move both in the short run and long run significantly. The impact of international oil price is positive on DOP but negative on PS and PR at least in the short run. Our finding signalled to the fact that increasing acceptance of the RMB in trade settlements and crude oil invoicing serve as a comparative advantage for China to engage in oil trade and complement the oil demand growth threatening the country's energy security drive. Therefore, we suggest diversification of crude oil import sources especially to regions/countries where RMB has been widely accepted. Prominence should be given to government controlled Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPRs) and large oil companies should be compelled to raise the level of mandatory oil reserve for sustainable supply that keep pace with the growing demand for oil.