China has not confirmed the oil reserves demanded by the United States

China, the world’s largest oil importer, has not compromised on its intention to release oil from its reserves as requested by Washington, while OPEC sources say the US action maker has not changed course.

On Wednesday, a Chinese government spokesman said the country would release reserves in line with its needs.

On Tuesday, the government of the President of the United States Joe Biden It announced plans to release millions of barrels of oil from strategic reserves in conjunction with other major consumer countries, including China, India and Japan, in an attempt to reduce prices.

The United States has made a huge commitment to release 50 million barrels of pre-approved sales reserves along with loans to the market, but without China the move would have had little impact.

There were no further announcements from Beijing on Thursday, saying China was working on releasing its own reserves on Wednesday, confirming last week’s Reuters news that China would release oil as needed.

On Tuesday, Biden told a news conference that China “could do more.”

Rumors of a combined move cut oil prices ahead of the US announcement, but international markets rose more than 3% on Tuesday, confirming Washington was damaging its strategic reserves and the market was unclear about China’s intentions.

The market is also eager to see OPEC’s next move as the Washington announcement triggers speculation that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies will collectively call it OPEC +.

However, three sources told Reuters that the group was not considering violating its current agreement to increase production to 400,000 barrels per day per month, which is considered too slow by some consuming countries.

The OPEC +, which includes Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the Gulf and Russia, meets again on December 2 to discuss policy.

(* Reported by Yu Lun Tian in Beijing, Ahmed Khadar and Nova Browning in London, Olesya Astakova in Moscow; Timothy Gardner and Alexandra Alber in Washington, Aradi S. Nair and Florence Dawn in Singapore).