At CNPC’s 2025 mid-year work conference, the theme of “strengthening innovation-driven development and cultivating new quality productive forces” highlighted the company’s unprecedented emphasis on scientific and technological innovation. This reflects not only the implementation of President Xi Jinping’s directives on innovation but also CNPC’s mission to enhance its core capabilities and shoulder national responsibility. The focus, as emphasized by Academician Sun Jinsheng, should be on advancing scientific innovation, industrial transformation, and talent cultivation to inject fresh momentum into developing new quality productivity.

Strengthening Technological Innovation
Bottlenecks still constrain the development of new productive forces, with emerging and future industries facing new challenges. National oil and gas projects must be leveraged to achieve breakthroughs in critical technologies, ensuring independent and controllable capabilities. Equally important is boosting the number of original “from 0 to 1” breakthroughs and increasing investment in basic research.

Taking shale gas as an example, Sun identified three key challenges for China’s “shale revolution”: low one-trip drilling success rates in long horizontal sections, low fracturing efficiency, and high production decline rates. Addressing these requires scientific problem identification, targeted R&D aligned with China’s geological characteristics, and original technological breakthroughs.

For deep coalbed methane, drilling beyond 1,000 meters has long been hindered by weak coal cementation and fracture development. By studying collapse and loss mechanisms, CNPC developed core products including hydrophobic plugging agents, hydration inhibitors, and temperature-pressure-responsive loss control materials. These supported the successful drilling of a 3,000-meter-long horizontal well—the world’s longest in deep coal seams—demonstrating how innovation depends on theoretical breakthroughs, technology development, and successful application.

Integrating Technology and Industry
Deep integration of technological and industrial innovation requires efficient transformation of research results. Sun stressed the need to raise conversion rates, strengthen platforms for concept, pilot, and application validation, and build supportive evaluation and tolerance mechanisms. Field trials—such as dedicating drilling rigs for new technology testing—are vital to accelerate application. He also called for clearer role definition across research institutions, building a layered system of “basic research–applied R&D–engineering transformation” to create an innovation matrix capable of both world-class output and efficient transformation.

Cultivating Outstanding Engineers
Talent is the primary resource. CNPC must focus on both cultivating and attracting top-tier specialists while accelerating the development of young in-house talent into future leaders. Cross-disciplinary training is especially crucial, fostering engineers proficient in both engineering and digital-intelligent technologies to drive digital transformation.

Sun emphasized cultivating engineers who are patriotic, dedicated, and capable of solving complex engineering problems with strong innovative skills. Recent initiatives include deepening school-enterprise integration, forming joint teams of academic and industry mentors with engineering graduate students under the model of “research one project, train one talent.” Going forward, CNPC will pursue the “Four Excellences”—excellence in thinking, technology, management, and engineers—embedding diverse practical outcomes into training and graduation assessments, and establishing a full-chain talent development system integrating education, research, and application. This will ensure CNPC plays a leading role in engineering talent cultivation.