Yes, China produces a significant amount of oil. With domestic crude oil production averaging 4.3 million barrels per day in 2024, China ranks as the fifth-largest oil producer in the world. That still falls far short of what the country actually consumes, making China heavily dependent on imports to fill the gap.
How China Ranks Among Top Producers
China’s 5.26 million barrels per day of total oil production in 2023 (a figure that includes crude oil plus other petroleum liquids) gave it roughly 5% of global output. That places it behind the United States (22%), Saudi Arabia (11%), Russia (11%), and Canada (6%), but ahead of major producers like Iraq, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s a substantial volume by any measure, though it represents a small fraction of what the top three produce.
Where China’s Oil Comes From
Three state-owned companies control nearly all of China’s domestic production. PetroChina, a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), is by far the largest, pumping about 2.6 million barrels per day in 2024. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) produced around 1 million barrels per day, and Sinopec contributed roughly 696,000 barrels per day.
The oil itself comes from fields spread across the country. The two most historically important are the Daqing oilfield in northeastern China and the Shengli oilfield in the eastern province of Shandong. Both have been operating for more than 50 years, with Daqing’s cumulative output exceeding 2 billion tonnes and Shengli’s surpassing 1 billion tonnes. Both fields have passed their peak production stages and are in long-term decline, which has pushed exploration westward.
The Tarim Basin in the far-western Xinjiang region has become increasingly important. The Tarim oilfield’s combined oil and gas production exceeded 33 million tonnes of oil equivalent in 2024. Within the Tarim Basin, the Fuman oilfield alone has produced over 10 million cumulative tonnes, including 8.67 million tonnes of crude oil. Natural gas output from the southwestern part of the Tarim field grew from 3 billion cubic meters in 2018 to 10 billion cubic meters in 2023. Offshore fields in the South China Sea and Bohai Bay also contribute a growing share, reflected in CNOOC’s expanding production targets of 2.1 to 2.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2026.
Why China Still Imports So Much Oil
Despite producing over 4 million barrels per day domestically, China’s appetite for oil far exceeds what it can pull from its own ground. The country is the world’s largest crude oil importer because its refining sector and petrochemical manufacturing demand volumes that domestic wells simply cannot match. China’s total oil consumption runs roughly 15 to 16 million barrels per day, meaning the country produces only about a quarter to a third of what it uses. The rest arrives by tanker, primarily from Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian suppliers.
This gap between production and consumption is a long-standing feature of China’s energy picture, not a recent development. As older fields like Daqing and Shengli have declined, new discoveries in western China and offshore have helped stabilize output but haven’t been large enough to reverse the overall trend of growing import dependence.
Aging Fields and Shifting Demand
China’s production outlook is shaped by two forces pulling in opposite directions. On the supply side, the country’s legacy oilfields are well past their prime. Maintaining output from mature fields requires increasingly energy-intensive extraction techniques, which raises costs and limits how much production can grow. New fields in the Tarim Basin and offshore zones have helped offset some of that decline, keeping total output relatively stable in recent years rather than dropping sharply.
On the demand side, there are early signs that China’s oil consumption growth is slowing. The International Energy Agency projects that China’s diesel demand will peak in 2025, and S&P Global Commodity Insights forecasts that gasoline demand will peak in the same year. The rapid adoption of electric vehicles, expanded high-speed rail, and a broader economic shift away from heavy industry are all contributing factors. Several agencies project that global oil demand could approach a peak between 2025 and 2030 at 105 to 108 million barrels per day, with China’s slowdown playing a central role in that timeline.
If demand does plateau while domestic production holds roughly steady, China’s import dependency could stabilize or even gradually ease. For now, though, the country remains one of the world’s largest oil producers and its single largest importer at the same time.