Up 71.2% from a Year Ago
The Korea Petroleum Association announced on Jan. 29 that South Korean oil refining companies’ petroleum product exports hit an all-time high of US$57.037 billion last year, up 71.2 percent from a year ago.
In 2022, South Korea’s crude oil imports totaled US$95.45 billion and the ratio of the exports to the imports hit an all-time high of approximately 60 percent. The ratio has been more than 50 percent since 2012 and petroleum products were the second-largest export item of South Korea last year.
That year, the unit export price of those products rose about 53 percent to US$121.1 per barrel and the export profitability calculated by subtracting the unit import price of crude oil from the unit export price was US$18.5 per barrel, more than twice the previous year’s US$8.7. The exports totaled 471 million barrels in amount, up 12.1 percent year on year.
Diesel products accounted for 46.3 percent of the exports, followed by gasoline (19.4 percent), aviation fuel (18 percent) and naphtha (4.9 percent). The aviation fuel exports increased by no less than 130.8 percent.
The exports to Australia accounted for 18.3 percent of the total, followed by those to Singapore (12.1 percent), the United States (8.3 percent), China (7.9 percent) and Japan (7.7 percent). Vietnam came in seventh and the exports to Vietnam increased 380 percent last year.