While oil shipments to other parts of the world languish, this port in eastern China has an unusual problem—a lengthy queue of tankers waiting up to two weeks to unload their crude. The congestion is due to a surge in oil imports from a group of privately-owned refiners—dubbed “teapots” because of their small size compared with giant state-owned companies such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, PetroChina Co., and China National Offshore Oil Corp.—that are shaking up China’s oil industry and stoking global markets. Historically, these teapots have done most business with their larger domestic rivals, buying crude from them and processing it into gasoline and diesel. They still sell much of their output back to the big state-owned companies which run vast networks of gas stations across China. But since […]