Green Petcoke (GPC) Market Overview: Five Years of Global Trade, 2021–2025

Key message: Five years of customs data show a green petcoke market that grew 24% in volume between 2021 and 2024 while prices fell sharply from their 2022 peak. Supply sits with a small group of exporters led by the United States, demand has swung decisively toward India, and part of global supply is disclosed only through the customs records of buyers, not sellers.

Note on the data. Figures are drawn from UN Comtrade (HS 271311, “petroleum coke, not calcined”), 2021–2025. Several exporters do not publish their own export statistics, and 2025 is preliminary and missing China’s imports; treat the figures as directional and check them against the latest Comtrade release before reuse.

This post continues our market-data series for procurement and trading teams. It covers how large the green petcoke market is, who moves it in which direction, and where the trade data itself has gaps worth knowing before drawing commercial conclusions.

What “green petcoke” means here

HS 271311 covers petroleum coke before calcination, as it leaves the coking unit. As we noted in an earlier post on recarburizers, “GPC” is genuinely ambiguous shorthand in the industry: it can mean green petroleum coke (the subject here) or graphitized petroleum coke, a very different material further down the value chain. The code also mixes two products at very different price points – higher-sulfur fuel-grade coke and lower-sulfur coke destined for calcination into anode-grade material – so every average price below blends both grades in proportions that vary by origin and destination.

Market size and price moved on different tracks

World imports climbed in every complete year of the series, from 48.1 Mt in 2021 to 59.7 Mt in 2024. Price told a different story: it peaked at $14.25 billion in 2022 alongside the wider energy-price spike, then fell to $7.90 billion by 2024 as prices cooled – ending the period below where it started despite the larger volume moving. The lower figures shown for 2025 reflect incomplete reporting coverage, including China’s absence from the dataset, rather than an actual drop in trade.

Importers: the center of demand shifted to India

The five largest importers took 69% of world imports in 2024. India’s imports nearly quadrupled since 2021, putting it in the top spot at 15.5 Mt and pushing China – which had already eased back from its 2023 peak – into second at 13.4 Mt. Turkey and Brazil both expanded further down the list, while Mexico’s imports more than halved over the same stretch.

India’s 2025 total eased only slightly (-2.9%), and that headline number hides sharply divergent moves underneath: imports from Mexico rose more than fourfold even as several other origins pulled back. The customs data confirms these shifts happened; it says nothing about why.

Exporters: one dominant supplier, and a tier only buyers can see

The United States is the only exporter working at global scale – 36.7 Mt in 2024, spread across 67 destination countries, with India replacing China as its largest buyer over the period. Below the US, the next tier of suppliers – Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and others – only becomes visible once buyer-reported (mirror) data is added, since several of them publish no export statistics of their own.

Aggregate import totals flatten a real difference between India and China: each draws on a distinct mix of suppliers, visible once the flows are broken out by origin.

One customs code, two products

US export price swings widely by destination under this single HS code - from $141/t down to $59/t in 2024 - and that spread is grade, not a pricing anomaly. Buyers taking mostly low-sulfur coke cluster at the top; buyers taking higher-sulfur fuel-grade material sit at the bottom.

Limitations to keep in mind

Several exporters - Venezuela and Russia among them - do not publish export statistics and appear only through mirror data, which typically lands within about ±10% of a supplier's own figures where both exist. About 10% of country-level totals carry a UN-estimated rather than reported volume. 2025 coverage is incomplete - 66 reporters against 94-100 in prior years, with China absent - and should not be compared directly against earlier years. Dutch, Belgian and German export statistics partly reflect US-origin coke in transit, adding an estimated 1-2.5 Mt/year of double-counting to summed world export figures. Bilateral records can also disagree between the two sides of the same trade, which is reason enough to treat any single flow as provisional until checked.

Source: UN Comtrade Database (comtradeplus.un.org), HS 271311, annual data 2021–2025, extracted September 2026. Coverage is limited by the timeliness and completeness of national reporting; figures may be revised in later releases.

Procurement takeaway

Five years of data describe a market that grew in volume on its own schedule apart from price, stayed structurally dependent on a single exporter, and left a meaningful slice of supply disclosed only by buyers rather than sellers. None of it substitutes for grade-level specification: a customs code cannot show sulfur content or end use, only where material moved and roughly what it cost along the way.

Prime Elements works with buyers and sellers across the petroleum coke value chain - green, calcined and specialty grades - to source material matched to a specific process and specification, arrange independent sampling and inspection, and keep audit-ready documentation moving with the supply chain.