About Sinopec Petroleum Exploration and Production Research Institute

Sinopec Petroleum Exploration and Production Research Institute

The Sinopec Petroleum Exploration and Production Research Institute, known by the acronym PEPRIS, is the integrated upstream research institute of Sinopec, China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, and is headquartered in Beijing. Established in 2000, it is the organisation through which Sinopec concentrates its corporate-level work on oil and gas exploration and production research. Its researchers work on petroleum geology, unconventional oil and gas systems and reservoir characterisation for Sinopec's major basins, including shale gas in the Sichuan Basin, continental shale oil in the Ordos Basin and fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs in the Tarim Basin, supporting national-scale energy projects across the company's upstream portfolio.

Origins and establishment

According to Sinopec's own institutional profile, PEPRIS was established in 2000 and originated from seven petroleum geology research institutions of the former Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources. Sinopec describes the institute as carrying more than 40 years of accumulated history from those predecessor institutions alongside its own development experience since reorganisation. That lineage matters to understanding the institute's character: it was not created as a narrow laboratory, but as a consolidation of geological research bodies whose work on China's sedimentary basins long predated the modern Sinopec group. When Sinopec was reorganised as a modern energy and chemical corporation around 2000, a central institute was needed to hold basin knowledge, resource assessment capability and exploration advice at group level, rather than leaving that expertise dispersed among regional companies. PEPRIS was formed to perform that central role, and its Beijing headquarters has remained the seat of that function.

Role within Sinopec

Sinopec's profile defines three corporate functions for the institute. First, PEPRIS serves as an advisory department for petroleum exploration and production and for upstream development strategy, meaning its assessments inform where and how the group explores. Second, it is a research, development and service department for upstream key technologies, developing methods that operating companies can apply in the field. Third, it acts as the information and geological data centre for petroleum exploration and production, holding and managing the geological record on which exploration decisions depend. The institute is also qualified to consult on Class-A engineering projects, and two of its testing facilities, the Petroleum Geology Experimental and Testing Center and the Geochemical Testing Center, have passed National Measurement Accreditation, giving its laboratory results formal standing within China's measurement system.

Strategic planning and resource assessment

Strategic planning is one of the distinguished areas of expertise Sinopec attributes to PEPRIS. The institute's work includes petroleum exploration and production strategic planning and the assessment of hydrocarbon resources, tasks that require it to evaluate basins as whole systems rather than as individual prospects. Its researchers study how reservoirs form, an area Sinopec describes as petroleum reservoir forming theory, and apply that theory to resource assessment, with particular strength in marine carbonate sequences. China contains extensive ancient marine carbonate rocks, especially in the Tarim and Sichuan basins, and understanding how oil and gas were generated, migrated and trapped in those rocks underpins some of the country's largest gas discoveries. By holding this assessment function centrally, PEPRIS provides a common technical basis on which Sinopec compares opportunities across regions as different as the deserts of Xinjiang, the mountains of Sichuan and the rift basins of eastern China.

Marine carbonate and fractured-vuggy reservoirs

The efficient development of fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs is listed by Sinopec among the institute's signature technologies, and the Tarim Basin is the principal setting for that work in the institute's published profile. In Tarim's deep Ordovician carbonates, hydrocarbons are stored not in uniform pore spaces but in networks of fractures and dissolution cavities, known as vugs, formed over geological time. Such reservoirs are difficult to image seismically, difficult to predict before drilling and difficult to drain efficiently once found, because production can vary sharply between neighbouring wells. Research into their characterisation therefore combines seismic interpretation, well logging, geological modelling and production data. The same basin also hosts Sinopec's ultra-deep Shunbei field, where the reservoir lies at an average burial depth of more than 7,300 metres and holds around 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent in recoverable reserves, illustrating the extreme depths at which Tarim carbonate research must operate.

Unconventional oil and gas research

Unconventional resources form the second great strand of the institute's work named in its profile. PEPRIS researchers work on unconventional oil and gas systems, and the institute hosts or is affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Shale Oil and Gas Enrichment Mechanisms and Effective Development, whose name appears on PEPRIS-affiliated papers in journals such as Petroleum Science, alongside Sinopec key laboratories for shale oil and gas exploration and production technology and for well logging. Published PEPRIS research in this field includes studies of how shale oil is stored, in what states it occurs and which geological factors control it in saline lacustrine basins, using methods such as sequential solvent extraction, petrology, organic geochemistry and nuclear magnetic resonance. That kind of laboratory-based work addresses a practical question for producers: how much of the oil held in shale can actually be moved and produced, a question also taken up in institute research on quantifying movable oil saturation in shale oil.

Shale gas in the Sichuan Basin

The Sichuan Basin shale programme is the best documented example of the environment in which PEPRIS research is applied. Sinopec's Fuling field, in the basin, was China's first large commercial shale gas project, and in October 2020 the company added 191.83 billion cubic metres of newly proven shale gas geological reserves there, raising Fuling's total to 792.64 billion cubic metres, within total proven shale gas reserves of 940.77 billion cubic metres for Sinopec in China. Exploration has since pushed into deeper and more complex ground. In southeastern Sichuan, Sinopec established a shale gas resource belt running through Xinchang South, Dongxi, Dingshan and Lintanchang with an overall resource volume of 1.19305 trillion cubic metres, its second trillion-cubic-metre shale gas accumulation after Fuling. The company states that in 2017 it established a deep shale gas research and development team to pilot research in Dongxi, building a theoretical understanding of deep shale gas geology, a sweet-spot prediction technology for deep shale layers and fracturing technology designed for deep, highly stressed formations. In May 2025 Sinopec tested the Tiebei 1HF well at its Project Deep Earth Sichuan and Chongqing natural gas base: drilled to a vertical depth of 5,300 metres with a 1,312-metre horizontal section, a Chinese record for the vertical depth of a shale gas well, it flowed at 314,500 cubic metres per day after fracturing with 175-megapascal ultra-high-pressure equipment.

Continental shale oil and other basins

Beyond Sichuan shale gas, the institute's brief covers continental shale oil, with the Ordos Basin named in its profile among its principal research settings, and Sinopec's wider shale oil programme shows the scale of that effort. In eastern China, Sinopec has discovered the Xinxing and Qintong shale oil fields with combined proven reserves of 180 million tonnes, and at the Shengli Oilfield the company proved more than 140 million tonnes of shale oil geological reserves in the Jiyang depression, the first Chinese shale oil field with proven reserves above 100 million tonnes. National data cited in reporting of those discoveries put China's crude oil production at 213 million tonnes in 2024, with shale oil output of 6 million tonnes, up 30 percent year on year, and Sinopec expects to be producing 2 million tonnes of shale oil a year by the end of 2030. Research institutes such as PEPRIS supply the geological understanding, reservoir description and technology development on which targets of that kind depend, particularly for continental shales, whose layered, mixed sediments behave very differently from the marine shales of Sichuan.

Geochemistry and experimental testing

Laboratory science is a formal part of the institute's identity. Sinopec lists geochemical petroleum exploration technologies and testing and experimental analysis among PEPRIS's distinguished techniques, and its geochemical testing centre, like its petroleum geology experimental and testing centre, holds National Measurement Accreditation. Geochemistry in exploration is used to identify source rocks, judge their maturity, trace the origin of oils and gases found in wells and predict where further hydrocarbons may have accumulated. Combined with the institute's work on specific reservoir prediction technologies and development technologies for specific gas reservoirs, including the sour and ultra-deep gas reservoirs for which the Sichuan Basin is known, such as Puguang, described by Sinopec as China's largest marine-phase sour gas field, and Yuanba, described as the world's first ultra-deep marine-phase sour gas field above 7,000 metres, the laboratory programme connects sample-scale measurement to field-scale decisions.

International and academic work

PEPRIS also appears in the international technical literature and conference record. Its researchers have presented work such as a regional geological study and potential prediction of the Rio del Rey Basin offshore Cameroon, prepared by the institute's Addax research department for an AAPG and SPE Africa energy conference in Nairobi in 2016, reflecting the overseas exploration interests Sinopec held through its Addax operations. At home, institute-affiliated authors publish in international journals on shale systems, reservoir geology and related topics, frequently in collaboration with universities and with other Sinopec and PetroChina research bodies. This publishing record is one of the clearest public traces of the institute's day-to-day work, since much of its advisory and data work for Sinopec is internal.

Significance

PEPRIS occupies a distinctive position in Chinese energy research: a central, corporate institute whose predecessor bodies came from the state geological system, and whose modern mandate spans strategy, resource assessment, core technology development, accredited laboratory testing and custody of exploration data. Its named strengths, from marine carbonate reservoir theory and fractured-vuggy reservoir development in Tarim to shale gas in Sichuan and shale oil in Ordos and the eastern basins, map closely onto the fields where Sinopec has recorded its largest upstream achievements of the past two decades. As China's easily found conventional resources decline and exploration moves deeper and into unconventional rocks, the kind of integrated geological research the institute was created to provide has become more, not less, central to the company's future.