Guangzhou (JLC), March 20, 2026--China will take measures to ensure energy self-sufficiency, while it continues to transform and upgrade the sector, according to the outline of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) for national economic and social development dated March 13 on www.gov.cn.
China will ramp up energy security by ensuring self-sufficiency for core oil and gas demand. It will implement a strategic mid-to-long-term action plan for increasing oil and gas reserves and production, to make sure that the annual output of crude oil remains stable at around 200 million mt, while that of natural gas sees a steady growth. It will also improve the production capacity and technology for coal-to-oil and coal-to-gas. Furthermore, China will enhance the energy reserve coordination between the government and enterprises. It will increase the scale of national oil reserves and establish a more flexible mechanism for rotational utilization. It will reinforce the capacity for regulating and guaranteeing natural gas reserves, and perfect the coal reserve system, the outline said.
China will optimize and upgrade the traditional industries. It will promote structural adjustment in such industries as steel, petrochemicals, and shipbuilding, by giving priority to further development of premium steel bases, first-class petrochemical bases, as well as high-end shipbuilding and marine engineering equipment bases. It will also promote technological transformation and upgrading in these industries, to develop intelligent manufacturing, green manufacturing, and service-oriented manufacturing, thereby accelerating changes in their industrial models and corporate organizational forms. Moreover, it will carry out strict regulation to promote safety, environmental protection, energy efficiency, and quality, and push forward phase-out of outdated and inefficient production capacity by introducing market-oriented mergers, acquisitions and restructuring.
China will keep modernizing its infrastructure system by accelerating the development of a new clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy system. It will promote the safe, reliable, and orderly substitution of fossil energy with non-fossil energy, aiming to double the non-fossil energy supply in a decade by developing various clean energies that include wind power, solar power, hydropower, and nuclear power. It will coordinate the local consumption and external transmission of energy, construct clean energy bases such as wind-solar power bases in the Northwest, Northeast and North, integrated hydro-wind-solar bases in the Southwest, as well as coastal nuclear power bases and offshore wind power bases. It will intensify local development and utilization of distributed energy. In addition to the development of green hydrogen, ammonia, and methanol, it will advance solar thermal power generation and geothermal energy utilization, according to the outline.
To adapt to the new energy system, China will expedite improvement of its pricing mechanism, by perfecting the refined oil product pricing mechanism, deepening the reform in natural gas prices, and refining the policies for coal price interval regulation, the outline also added.
