One university in northwest China is built around petroleum, and it has been since 1951. Xi’an Petroleum University grew out of a surveying and drilling training class run by the national fuel ministry in the early days of the People’s Republic, became a school for the northwest petroleum administration, and in 1958 was upgraded to a full institute. It is the only university in the region with petroleum at its core, co-built by the Shaanxi government and China’s three major oil companies.
The school rode the industry’s ups and downs: converted to a factory in 1969, restored as a petroleum institute under the oil ministry in 1980, granted master’s rights in 1990, handed from China National Petroleum Corporation to joint central-provincial management in 2000, renamed a university in 2003, and approved as a doctoral institution in 2018. Through every change, petroleum remained the subject.
Today three campuses in Xi’an cover about 2,080 mu, roughly 139 hectares, with over 18,000 undergraduates, 5,400 postgraduates and 1,000-plus international students. Three first-level doctoral programs, led by oil and gas engineering with its postdoctoral station, sit above 18 first-level master’s programs, and four fields, engineering, chemistry, geoscience and materials science, rank in the ESI global top 1 percent.
Research is aimed at the reservoir: 54 national and provincial research bases serve seven signature areas from oil and gas exploration theory to engineering application, and in the past five years the university has taken on over 900 national and provincial projects with 1.24 billion yuan in funding. Its faculty of about 1,900 includes one academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and one of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.
The international side reaches 122 overseas partners, including a US-China 1+2+1 program with 28 American universities, and the university has trained more than 10,000 international students from 96 countries. It also leads the Silk Road energy education alliance, an academic network strung along the routes that once carried oil lamps and now carry pipelines.
After 75 years, the school still lives by its founding bargain: the industry built this university, and the university repays it in graduates, more than 190,000 of them by now, spread through China’s oil fields and refineries.
Data Source: XAPI Official Website (as of 2026)
