With Moscow under pressure to sell surplus volumes no longer going to the EU, China has saved billions of dollars on purchases of cheaper Russian oil and coal, and made returns trading excess supplies.
China's crude imports from Russia jumped 8% in 2022 from a year earlier to 86.25 million tonnes (MT), even as the country's overall imports slipped 0.9%.
This gave Russia a 17% share of the Chinese oil market, up from 15% the year before, though it remained a close second to top supplier Saudi Arabia, with 87.5MT supplied.
Based on an estimated $10 a barrel discount for both ESPO and Urals crude on delivered basis, Chinese refiners saved about $5.5 billion over the April 2022 to January 2023.
China's seaborne crude imports from Russia are set to hit an all-time high of about 1.4 million bpd in March.
China has also increased coal imports from Russia even as it cut back overall imports of the fuel because of more domestic production.
Russian coal arrivals surged 20% in 2022 from a year earlier to 68.06MT, with coking coal imports doubling to reach 21MT.
Without bottlenecks in Russian rail capacity that are hampering transport of coal eastwards, imports could have been even higher.
Average import prices of Russian coking coal were around $217.33 a tonne in 2022.
For LNG, China's imports from Russia soared over 40% on an annual basis in 2022 to 6.5MT, while exports rose as China re-exported volumes to other nations.
Overall LNG imports by China fell 19.5% last year to 63.4MT, as strict lockdown measures slowed economic activity and curbed demand.
China spent on average just under $20 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) for each tonne of imported Russian LNG.
Electricity imports from Russia stayed steady over the period of 2017-2020 at about 3 billion kilowatt-hour (kWh).
Imports grew to 3.8 billion kWh in 2021 as China suffered a wide-ranging power shortage and continued to increase by 23% in 2022 to 4.7 billion kWh.