CNPC regards technological innovation as the key to enhancing its core competence and maintaining sustainable development.

While focusing on R&D in priority areas such as increasing prospecting efficiency in complicated regions, improving the recovery factor of mature oilfields, reducing prospecting and development costs, and improving product quality and clean production, CNPC has made great strides in technical fields such as the prospecting of lithologic oil and gas reservoirs, prospecting in foreland basins, improving the recovery factor with polymer and chemical-flooding and the rapid assessment of oil and gas reservoirs in passive rift basins.

We have come up with special technologies and products in sectors such as high-definition seismic prospecting in complicated regions, under-balanced drilling, and the manufacturing and application of drilling rigs for ultra-deep wells and X80 high-tensile steel pipes. We have also developed various types of equipment and software.

CNPC has won 38 national awards since 2002, including four first-class and 32 second-class National Scientific and Technological Advancement Prizes, and two second-class China National Technical Invention Prizes. In 2007, CNPC won four National Science and Technology Advancement Prizes and acquired 1,172 patents out of its 1,418 patent applications, including 155 out of 425 applications for invention patents. This was the first time more than 1,000 patents were acquired in a single year. By the end of 2007, CNPC had acquired 7,010 patents out of its 9,693 patent applications.