The move, backed by the US, will anger the Pyongyang despot after the UN attempted to punish the rogue state for its latest intercontinental ballistic missile test.
Kim will be furious that his isolated and struggling economy could be crippled, experts warn, because the resolution seeks to ban nearly 90 percent of refined petroleum product exports to North Korea.
The measure will cap them at 500,000 barrels a year and, in what diplomats said was a last-minute change, demands the repatriation of North Koreans working abroad within 24 months, instead of 12 months as first proposed.
The US-drafted resolution would also cap crude oil supplies to North Korea at four million barrels a year.
Peter Ward, a columnist for NK News, a website that tracks North Korea, said: “If they were enforced, the cap on oil would be devastating for North Korea’s haulage industry, for North Koreans who use generators at home or for productive activities, and for (state-owned enterprises) that do the same.”
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Michael Kirby, who led a UN inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea, added that cutting off fuel imports would be “a very serious step”.
He said: “Cutting off oil, petroleum supplies, would obviously have a very big impact on the ordinary population.”
China, which supplies most of North Korea’s oil, has backed successive rounds of UN sanctions but had resisted past US calls to cut off supplies to its neighbour.
The tough resolution passed by a vote of 15 to 0, according to Japan’s ambassador to the United Nations. Japan holds the presidency of the Security Council this month.
It comes after North Korea said on November 29, it had successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in a “breakthrough” that puts the US mainland within range of its nuclear weapons whose warheads could withstand re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Tensions have been rising over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes, which it pursues in defiance of years of U.N. Security Council resolutions, with bellicose rhetoric coming from both Pyongyang and the White House.
In November, North Korea called for a halt to what it called “brutal sanctions”, saying a previous round imposed after its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on September 3 constituted genocide.
US diplomats have made clear they are seeking a diplomatic solution but have proposed new, tougher sanctions to ratchet up pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
The United States has been calling on China to limit its oil supply to its neighbour and ally.
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said: “It (the resolution) sends the unambiguous message to Pyongyang that further defiance will invite further punishments and isolation.”
North Korea regularly threatens to destroy South Korea, the United States and Japan, and says its weapons programmes are necessary to counter US aggression.
The United States stations 28,500 troops in the South, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.
On Friday, a spokesperson for North Korea’s foreign ministry called US President Donald Trump’s recently released national security strategy the latest American policy seeking to “stifle our country and turn the entire Korean peninsula” into an outpost of American hegemony.
He blasted that Mr Trump was seeking “total subordination of the whole world”.