Via NK News, an article on a pipeline for crude oil between China and the DPRK:

North Korea fired its way back into international headlines in March when it launched two short-range ballistic missiles towards the East Sea, sparking outcry from officials in Seoul, Washington, Tokyo and beyond. 

Back in 2017, the United Nations had had enough with North Korea’s missile tests and enacted a series of economic sanctions against the country that were meant to starve off its nuclear program. Years later, it’s now clear that North Korea continues to develop its weapons, with Pyongyang rolling out its largest-ever ballistic missile for the world to see last October. 

So, how is North Korea’s economy still able to survive — and how is such a poor country still able to divert resources to fancy new missiles and warheads? 

There are many factors to the country’s survival, but one of them is powerful and perfectly legal: the Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline. 

Before 2017 U.N. sanctions, the Dandong-Sinuiju oil pipeline supplied almost all of North Korea’s crude oil, which itself was roughly half of the country’s overall fuel consumption. A good part of North Korea’s oil imports — the lifeblood of a modern economy and the foundation of its nuclear weapons program — flowed through this one critical chokepoint.

Even as the DPRK adapted under sanctions by developing a vast, illegal network of maritime smugglers to meet its refined petroleum needs, crude oil kept flowing from Dandong in unknown amounts. That’s because China successfully argued to the U.N. that restricting the flow would cause unremovable buildup, which would render the pipeline inoperable if it ever needed to be turned on again.

This was a monumental concession. The U.N. and other major authorities are unable to monitor how much crude oil is flowing through the pipeline, meaning that North Korea could be flouting the rules and surpassing its fuel cap at ease.

“From the point of view of sanctions enforcement, obviously any additional supply of oil means less pressure on the North Korean government,” said Peter Ward, a researcher on the North Korean economy and a contributor to NK Pro.

The pipeline’s permitted flow is eight times the United Nations’ 500,000-barrel cap on refined petroleum that North Korea is supposed to stick to each year. Crude oil is capped at 4 million barrels (525,000 tons) — a limit that at least one researcher says was made specifically to adjust for the Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline.

“China has been supplying a stable supply, presumably at friendship prices, to North Korea through the pipeline for many years … This is both before and after sanctions,” said Daniel Wertz, program manager at the National Committee on North Korea. “[UNSCR 2397] basically exempted North Korea’s first 525,000 tons of crude oil imports.” 

Neither of these yearly caps qualify as a massive amount of fuel; South Korea imported 2.5 million barrels of petroleum and other liquids per day in 2019, for example. But the problem is that the lack of data on the pipeline arguably undermines U.N. sanctions and the fuel caps themselves.

No data on North Korean crude oil is published by the U.N. each month, despite the fact that refined petroleum data is made public. Experts say China is supposed to report crude oil numbers to the U.N. Security Council’s 1718 Sanctions Committee, but it’s unclear whether they actually do — or if those figures are genuine. “Who knows whether or not they’ve actually been reporting since it’s [all] private, but they’re obliged to under the sanctions regime,” Wertz said.

David von Hippel, a senior associate at the Nautilus Institute who writes yearly reports estimating North Korea’s fuel consumption, told NK Pro that “it is very hard for outsiders” to “actually determine the flow.” Von Hippel and his colleague, Peter Hayes, estimated in Sept. 2020 that 750,000 tonnes would travel through the pipeline by the end of that year.

“[We] estimated the flow in 2020 to be a bit higher than in recent years, and higher than the maximum — 4 million barrels — specified in UNSC sanctions, based on our conjecture that the Chinese may be sending more crude oil to the DPRK to partially compensate for loss of imported refined products,” he said.

And according to Wertz and von Hippel, it’s unlikely that crude oil is coming from anywhere but the Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline. As it is, North Korea has a very limited capacity for refining crude oil so that it can be used to fuel the country’s machines.

“The country’s main refinery, the Ponghwa refinery, essentially refines all the oil from the Dandong pipeline,” Wertz said. “And the rest of the country’s fuel needs that don’t come from domestic sources like coal come in the form of refined petroleum.”