China Oil & Gas Pipeline Network Corporation, known as PipeChina or the National Pipeline Network Group, is the state-owned company that owns and operates China's long-distance oil and gas pipelines. Its head office is in Beijing and it is supervised by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council. The group's remit covers the construction and operation of trunk pipelines and peak-shaving infrastructure, interconnection between trunk lines and third-party pipes, and national dispatching of the oil and gas network.
Formation and ownership
The company was formally established on 9 December 2019 after approval by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, as part of the reform of the country's oil and gas system and pipeline operating mechanism. On 30 September 2020 it signed asset-handover and operating-transfer agreements with the three major national oil companies and six state-owned investment institutions, and moved to full substantive operation from 1 October 2020. It states that it has been graded A in the performance assessment of central enterprise leaders for several consecutive years.
Pipelines, terminals and storage
PipeChina manages 112,900 km of oil and gas pipelines, made up of:
- 63,800 km of natural gas pipelines
- 22,100 km of crude oil pipelines
- 27,000 km of refined product pipelines
The network reaches 30 provincial-level regions plus the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The group also operates eight underground gas storage facilities and ten LNG receiving terminals, which it describes as the leading peak-shaving capability in China and which are concentrated in the Bohai Rim, the Yangtze River Delta and the southeast coast.
How the gas network is organised
The gas system is built around what the company calls four strategic corridors and a five-vertical, five-horizontal backbone. It links 25 principal domestic gas sources with imported pipeline gas from Central Asia, Russia and Myanmar, as well as 25 LNG terminals and 21 underground storage sites. At the end of 2025 the gas pipeline network totalled about 63,800 km with a primary transmission capacity of roughly 420 billion cubic metres a year.
Crude oil and refined products
Crude oil pipelines follow a four-corridor, three-region pattern and connect 18 domestic oilfields, 42 refining and chemical enterprises and the main crude reserve bases. Primary crude transmission capacity reached 345 million tonnes a year at the end of 2025. The product pipeline system is arranged as two vertical and two horizontal lines serving five regional clusters, connects 40 domestic refineries and covers 26 provincial-level regions, with primary transmission capacity of 189 million tonnes a year at the end of 2025.
Open access and activity in 2026
The group publishes its remaining pipeline capacity, LNG terminal processing capacity and gas storage capacity at regular intervals so that infrastructure can be opened to users on fair and non-discriminatory terms, an arrangement the company describes as the X plus 1 plus X model of multiple upstream suppliers, a single midstream network and a competitive downstream market. Construction work continued through 2026: the company reported that more than 2,500 km of new trunk oil and gas pipelines were built nationally during the year, that the Hainan ring-island gas network passed 35 billion cubic metres of cumulative deliveries, and that its Tianjin LNG terminal set new marks for throughput. Progress was also reported on the second Sichuan-to-East China gas pipeline, the Guozigou tunnel section of the second and third West-East gas lines, and the Changchun-Shijiazhuang and Daqing-Changling pipeline projects. The 2026 annual shareholders' meeting was held on 31 August 2026.