The old oilfield continues to produce oil and gas, while also giving rise to new energy sources.
Generating 1.105 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in six months is enough to meet the annual household electricity needs of approximately 550,000 families. The entity achieving this is not a traditional power plant, but an oilfield. Statistics show that as of June 6, 2026, the annual green electricity generation from PetroChina's Tarim Oilfield has already reached 1.105 billion kilowatt-hours. It's surprising to see a legacy oilfield transform into a major player in new energy power generation. This transformation reflects a fundamental shift in China's energy landscape.
Oilfields Generating Green Power
To date, the Tarim Oilfield has constructed five centralized photovoltaic power stations in Yuli, Qiemo, Yecheng, Jiashi, and Shangku, with a total installed capacity reaching 2.6 million kilowatts. The concept of an oilfield generating green power might seem contradictory at first glance. It's important to note that the Tarim Oilfield is the third-largest onshore oil and gas field in China. Located in southern Xinjiang, spanning the Taklamakan Desert, the Tarim Basin is one of China's most significant oil and gas-bearing basins.
In 1989, the Tarim Petroleum Campaign commenced, and the area gradually developed into a primary gas source for the West-East Gas Pipeline project and a representative region for deep-earth oil and gas exploration. To date, the Tarim Oilfield has discovered and developed 32 large and medium-sized oil and gas fields, including Lunnan and Tazhong, with cumulative proven reserves of 2.96 billion tons of oil and gas equivalent and total output exceeding 420 million tons. In 2025, the oil and gas production equivalent of the Tarim Oilfield surpassed 33 million tons, maintaining stable annual production above 30 million tons for six consecutive years. It supplies gas not only to Xinjiang but also, via the West-East Gas Pipeline, to major energy-consuming provinces in East and Central China, making significant contributions to national energy security.
Given its abundant oil and gas resources, why is the Tarim Oilfield venturing into green power? The answer lies in its geological characteristics. Although the Tarim Basin is China's largest oil and gas-bearing basin, most of its resources are buried 6,000 to 7,000 meters underground, under complex geological conditions, making extraction extremely challenging. Deeper extraction demands higher energy consumption for drilling, fracturing, injection-production, gathering, and processing, leading to substantial electricity use.
Combined with electricity for living and office areas, power costs are a significant expense. Previously, a large portion of the Tarim Oilfield's operational electricity came from grid-supplied thermal power or self-generated gas power. Now, photovoltaic power generation has become another viable option.
From a resource perspective, the Tarim region is not only rich in oil and gas but also exceptionally endowed with solar resources. Southern Xinjiang enjoys long sunshine hours, strong radiation, vast desert and Gobi areas, and low population density, resulting in relatively fewer land constraints for building large-scale photovoltaic stations. Compared to eastern and central regions, developing photovoltaics here avoids large-scale occupation of arable land and facilitates the creation of major energy bases.
The primary costs for photovoltaic power generation, besides equipment, involve land, grid connection, and consumption conditions. The Tarim Oilfield possesses vast deserts, existing infrastructure like oilfield roads, substations, and transmission lines, and stable industrial electricity loads. This means that the same unit of green electricity, consumed internally within the oilfield operations, saves substantial costs associated with purchasing external power.
Furthermore, green power offers policy and market revenue potential. Currently, China's green certificate system is being progressively refined. Green certificates are "electronic IDs" for renewable energy power, with each certificate representing 1,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity. On December 1, 2025, after certification and cancellation via the national green certificate issuance and trading system, the Tarim Oilfield successfully transferred 1 million green certificates to Guangdong Petrochemical. This delivery signifies that the Tarim Oilfield provided 1 billion kilowatt-hours of green electricity to Guangdong Petrochemical. Thus, green power not only helps the Tarim Oilfield reduce production costs but also generates tangible economic benefits.
Evolving into Integrated Energy Service Providers
The combination of oilfields and new energy is not unique to Tarim. Multiple oil and gas fields under PetroChina are advancing projects in photovoltaics, wind power, geothermal, energy storage, and hydrogen.
The Yumen Oilfield, known as the cradle of China's petroleum industry, has built six photovoltaic power projects with a cumulative installed capacity of 541,000 kilowatts and an annual generation capacity of 1.071 billion kilowatt-hours. It has achieved 11 "firsts" for PetroChina, Gansu Province, and even the nation, initially piecing together the blueprint for an integrated "oil, gas, electricity, hydrogen" energy company. By July 2025, the Yumen Oilfield produced 299 million kilowatt-hours of green electricity, equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 850,000 tons, serving as a model for legacy oilfield transformation.
The distributed wind power project at the Daqing Oilfield's South Five 110kV substation was connected to the grid, with a total installed capacity of 31.25 megawatts and an expected annual generation of 90 million kilowatt-hours. This is PetroChina's first steel-concrete hybrid tower wind power project, setting three company records for the largest single-unit capacity, tallest tower, and largest blade diameter.
Other fields like Shengli, Jilin, and Xinjiang are also conducting similar explorations. Although their approaches differ—some focusing on photovoltaics, others on wind, or combining geothermal, waste heat utilization, and storage—the direction is consistent: tapping into existing oil and gas resources while expanding into new energy.
These cases reflect the strategic shift of PetroChina from a traditional fossil fuel producer to an integrated energy service provider. This transition is not accidental but an inevitable result of multiple converging factors.
On one hand, major domestic legacy oilfields are generally in their mid-to-late production stages, with easily accessible shallow reserves declining yearly. The difficulty and cost of exploring and extracting deep oil and gas are rising, narrowing the growth space from relying solely on increased oil and gas output, thus necessitating a second growth curve.
On the other hand, with the accelerated construction of the national new power system, wind and solar power are entering a window of large-scale expansion. Leveraging their own land, site, and grid resources to deploy new energy has become the most logical transformation path for petroleum enterprises.
With long-term expertise in oil and gas development and sales, PetroChina has accumulated extensive energy project development capabilities, a nationwide pipeline and sales network, and a vast customer base. These assets remain valuable in the new energy era.
Data shows that in 2025, PetroChina's investment in new energy reached a record high of 41.46 billion yuan, comprehensively deploying in four major sectors: wind and solar, geothermal, hydrogen, and CCUS, to build an integrated "oil, gas, thermal, electricity, hydrogen" energy system. Among these, the installed capacity for wind and solar grew by 40.6% year-on-year, cumulatively exceeding 17 million kilowatts, with new installations surpassing 7 million kilowatts. Evidently, PetroChina has become a core force driving the growth of domestic wind and solar capacity.
In 2022, PetroChina established China Oil Green Electricity Company, formally entering the electric vehicle charging, battery swapping, and charging pile sales business. By 2026, through its Kunlun Grid Power operations, PetroChina operated over 6,000 charging stations with more than 80,000 charging guns, covering all provinces in China.
In September 2023, PetroChina partnered with industry giants like SAIC Motor, Sinopec, and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) to jointly invest 4 billion yuan to establish Shanghai Jieneng Zhidian New Energy Technology Co., Ltd., marking PetroChina's official entry into the new energy vehicle power battery leasing and battery swap service sector.
Controlled nuclear fusion, known as the "ultimate energy" for its virtually unlimited resources, zero carbon emissions, and absence of nuclear waste, is another frontier. In 2025, through its subsidiary Kunlun Capital, PetroChina invested 5.9 billion yuan to acquire stakes in Fusion New Energy (Anhui) Co., Ltd. and China Fusion Energy Co., Ltd., formally entering the "ultimate energy" field.
In the past, PetroChina's core role was finding, extracting, refining, and selling oil and gas. Now, in addition to fossil fuels, the energy it provides includes green electricity, hydrogen, and even nuclear energy. For PetroChina, new energy is not a side business but a core engine for reshaping the energy landscape.
The Logic of Gradual Optimization
Discussions on energy transition often fall into a binary opposition of "either fossil fuels or new energy." In reality, the real world is more complex. As the world's largest energy consumer, China has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2060, by which time non-fossil energy sources are projected to account for 80% of the mix. Transitioning from today's roughly 75% fossil fuel dependence to 80% non-fossil sources is a massive undertaking that cannot be achieved overnight.
The approach must be gradual optimization under the premise of ensuring energy security: replacing high-carbon energy with new energy bit by bit, transforming traditional industries with green power incrementally, and employing system optimization rather than simple switching. The phenomenon of legacy oilfields generating green power embodies precisely this logic of gradual optimization.
Oilfields utilize their own idle land to develop photovoltaics. The revenue from photovoltaics then supports the core oil and gas business, making the production process cleaner and providing the nation with cleaner energy. Ultimately, this achieves multiple benefits: stable oil and gas production, corporate carbon reduction, and enhanced national energy security.
The old oilfield continues to produce oil and gas, while also giving rise to new energy sources.
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