Cory Combs
Head of Supply Chain and Critical Minerals Research at Trivium China · Former renewable/nuclear energy technology commercialization consultant at the US Department of Energy
“Hung Li is different. Hungley is one of the private mega refineries that has integrated operations across transportation fuels, across petrochemicals... and it has significant exposure to the US dollar in global trading. And more importantly, the banks that give it lines of credit have direct exposure to the US dollar system.”
“What that is pressing on, what that's contesting is US is Chinese banks access to the US dollar system. That is a line that Beijing has to hold.”
“We do expect someone to get pincered. It hasn't happened yet. But not only is there the US sanctions and then the blocking rules... at some point some company is going to be forced in the position of either not being able to deal in China or not being able to deal with the USD while being incredibly exposed to China.”
“The bigger issue for China is if the US Goes after all of the private mega refiners, or at least a bigger chunk of them. If it goes after Zhejiang Petrochemical, Hung Li and Rongshan, significantly, all at once, that fundamentally changes the game.”
“Beijing has specifically opened the SPR to enable increasing market share in the chemical space, which I find is just really an incredibly important piece of this... Sinopec and Hung Li with less SPR access specifically eat up some of the market for petrochemicals... we're also seeing them basically take up market share while the rest of the world's petrochemical production is suffering from feedstock issues.”
“In almost every major negotiation between this Trump administration and China, there has been a significant gap between what the US readout says and what China says agreed to. This was most notable in the case of Busan... markets react to what supply will I and won't I have in the next year. If you get that wrong, if the president of the US says the wrong thing there, that reshapes markets very directly.”
“President Trump may be willing to negotiate on the fly. President Xi is not that China was never going to agree to something that hadn't been through 20 levels of bureaucracy.”
“It is absolutely not in the US's interest to escalate this. The threat of secondary sanctions makes sense as a negotiating tactic... if you really go, I think this is where it really matters to understand why Hung Li is fundamentally different in China's industrial economy and financial economy... If the US thinks that this is something that China can just live with, it can afford to throw its weight around, it would be mistaken.”
“Beijing has clearly has the option to help here and is very specifically allowing this exogenous shock to give political cover to accelerate the consolidation that it's been seeking for a long time. (Re: Shandong teapot refiners being forced offline by the Iran blockade.)”
Cory Combs
One-line summary: Strategic advisor on China supply-chain and critical-minerals issues; Trivium China research head; advises governments and multinationals; surfaced the Hengli-as-USD-system-pressure thesis.
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Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On hengli-petrochemical, us-china-banking-sanctions-pincer:
"Hung Li is different. Hungley is one of the private mega refineries that has integrated operations across transportation fuels, across petrochemicals... and it has significant exposure to the US dollar in global trading. And more importantly, the banks that give it lines of credit have direct exposure to the US dollar system." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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On us-china-banking-sanctions-pincer:
"What that is pressing on, what that's contesting is US is Chinese banks access to the US dollar system. That is a line that Beijing has to hold." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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On us-china-banking-sanctions-pincer:
"We do expect someone to get pincered. It hasn't happened yet. But not only is there the US sanctions and then the blocking rules... at some point some company is going to be forced in the position of either not being able to deal in China or not being able to deal with the USD while being incredibly exposed to China." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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On hengli-petrochemical, us-china-banking-sanctions-pincer:
"The bigger issue for China is if the US Goes after all of the private mega refiners, or at least a bigger chunk of them. If it goes after Zhejiang Petrochemical, Hung Li and Rongshan, significantly, all at once, that fundamentally changes the game." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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"Beijing has specifically opened the SPR to enable increasing market share in the chemical space, which I find is just really an incredibly important piece of this... Sinopec and Hung Li with less SPR access specifically eat up some of the market for petrochemicals... we're also seeing them basically take up market share while the rest of the world's petrochemical production is suffering from feedstock issues." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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On trump-xi-summit-2026, iran-war-2025-2026:
"In almost every major negotiation between this Trump administration and China, there has been a significant gap between what the US readout says and what China says agreed to. This was most notable in the case of Busan... markets react to what supply will I and won't I have in the next year. If you get that wrong, if the president of the US says the wrong thing there, that reshapes markets very directly." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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"President Trump may be willing to negotiate on the fly. President Xi is not that China was never going to agree to something that hadn't been through 20 levels of bureaucracy." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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On us-iran-nuclear-negotiations-2025-2026, us-china-banking-sanctions-pincer:
"It is absolutely not in the US's interest to escalate this. The threat of secondary sanctions makes sense as a negotiating tactic... if you really go, I think this is where it really matters to understand why Hung Li is fundamentally different in China's industrial economy and financial economy... If the US thinks that this is something that China can just live with, it can afford to throw its weight around, it would be mistaken." — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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"Beijing has clearly has the option to help here and is very specifically allowing this exogenous shock to give political cover to accelerate the consolidation that it's been seeking for a long time. (Re: Shandong teapot refiners being forced offline by the Iran blockade.)" — 2026-05-18-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-iran-conflict-brief-how-the-iran-standoff-is (2026-05-18)
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