CHINA is emerging as the winner from OPEC’s battle with rival oil producers as the world’s biggest energy consumer stockpiles crude.

    The nation’s efforts to boost reserves may increase its imports by as much as 700,000 barrels a day in 2015, according to London-based Energy Aspects Ltd. That’s more than half the global glut forecast by Citigroup Inc. after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) refrained from cutting output at its meeting last week. Brent crude has slumped 41 percent from its peak in June.

    The dwindling number of investors still betting on a rebound in prices can at least count on Chinese demand. As crude extends its slump to the lowest level in more than four years, China is seeking to build a strategic petroleum reserve.

    “This is a golden time window to acquire more strategic oil stockpiles at lower costs,” Gordon Kwan, the Hong Kong-based head of regional oil and gas research at Nomura Holdings Inc., wrote in an email Friday. China will be “a big beneficiary” from the OPEC decision, he said.

    China boosted imports by 8.3 percent, or 460,000 barrels a day, in the first nine months of this year, the fastest pace since 2010, customs data show. The country will overtake the United States as the world’s biggest oil consumer within two decades, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris.

    While China currently holds reserves equivalent to about 30 days of imports, the government is seeking to boost that level to 100 days by 2020, according to China Petrochemical Corp., Asia’s biggest refiner. That would be the equivalent of about 570 million barrels, based on the most recent monthly imports.

    China is buying more oil even as its economic expansion slows. The world’s second-biggest economy consumed the largest volume of oil on record in October, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

    Slumping prices will “push China to expedite its emergency reserve program,” Gao Jian, an analyst at Shandong, China-based consultant SCI International, said by phone Friday.

    The government has filled four sites with 91 million barrels of crude, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement Nov. 20. China finished building the sites, which have a capacity of about 103 million barrels, in 2009 under the first of three construction phases.

    Two of seven sites in the 191 million-barrel second phase were completed last year and construction has begun on two of the three sites for the third phase, China National Petroleum Corp., the nation’s top energy producer, said in January.(SD-Agencies)