Nestled in northern Cangzhou, Hebei Province, clusters of modern petrochemical facilities stand towering. This is Sinopec Cangzhou Petrochemical Co., Ltd., a state-owned enterprise with more than 50 years of operational history. After half a century of iterative upgrading, the veteran refinery is embracing vigorous new vitality amid China’s nationwide low-carbon transition.
In 1971, the first batch of construction workers trekked through knee-high suaeda salsa and stepped onto the desolate saline-alkali tract known locally as the "Beidahuang of Cangzhou". Living in semi-underground shacks nicknamed "one-piece dens", the team endured harsh extreme weather. The shacks offered no protection against bitter winter gales and turned sweltering and airless in summer. With limited supplies, workers ate frozen corn buns for meals and dried rain-soaked work uniforms using body heat, kicking off arduous grassroots construction with zero supporting infrastructure.
In October 1975, Cangzhou Petrochemical Plant, the predecessor of Sinopec Cangzhou Petrochemical, was officially completed and put into operation. It successfully produced qualified gasoline and diesel, ending Hebei Province’s long-term inability to independently refine petroleum products. Lacking automated equipment such as high-pressure water guns and robotic arms in the early stage, all equipment maintenance relied on manual labor. Workers cleared dirt and sediment inside reaction vessels with self-made steel pry bars, completing all technical troubleshooting purely by manpower.
After over five decades of expansion and technological renovation, the once barren wasteland has grown into a large-scale integrated refinery with an annual crude oil primary processing capacity of 3.5 million tons. The company now operates more than 20 core production units, including atmospheric and vacuum distillation, fluid catalytic cracking, delayed coking, diesel hydrotreating and countercurrent bed continuous reforming. Every production unit is monitored and controlled uniformly via distributed control system (DCS), the mainstream industrial intelligent control system for global petrochemical enterprises.
A striking contrast can be traced back to the commissioning of the delayed coking unit in 1999. The original on-site manual poking team, which required high-intensity on-site operation, was restructured into a digital technical tackling team. Liu Fuyou, a senior frontline technician with decades of working experience, commented on the upgraded DCS system. "A workflow that once required 20 workers working in coordination on-site can now be finished with just a few mouse clicks remotely." This change perfectly mirrors Cangzhou Petrochemical’s full shift from labor-intensive manual operation to unattended intelligent production.
Located in the key pollution transmission corridor of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei air pollution prevention zone, Sinopec Cangzhou Petrochemical has prioritized environmental investment as its core strategic layout for more than a decade. The enterprise has been certified as a Sinopec-level Green Enterprise for three consecutive years. By the end of 2022, its green facility construction rate reached 66.7%, and the green packaging coverage rate hit 96.4%, ranking among the top refineries in North China in green indicator performance.
To meet ultra-low emission standards in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the company has launched a full set of pollution remediation projects. It built a 20,000-ton-per-year sulfur recovery unit to recycle toxic sulfur-containing tail gas, and carried out targeted renovation for volatile organic compound (VOCs) governance and wastewater discharge upgrading. All atmospheric and water pollutant discharge indicators have met the national special emission limits, the strictest standard for industrial enterprises in North China. In terms of energy conservation and carbon reduction, the company’s total comprehensive energy consumption was equivalent to 365,300 tons of standard coal by the end of 2022. It has overfulfilled energy conservation quotas assigned by Cangzhou municipal government for four consecutive years.
Facing oversupply and fierce homogenized competition in the domestic refining industry, Cangzhou Petrochemical relies on technological innovation to optimize the whole industrial chain. It established a cross-departmental overall optimization team and adopted two incentive mechanisms: project collection and "leading the list" technology tackling. The enterprise openly solicited cost-reduction and efficiency-increasing proposals across all departments, and assigned professional technical backbones to lead breakthroughs in bottleneck links covering crude oil procurement, on-site refining operation and high-value chemical product R&D.
In product structure optimization, the company adjusted production capacity dynamically based on market demand. It realized full-capacity production and full sales of food-grade sulfur after quality system upgrading. By optimizing operating parameters of the delayed coking unit, two new high-value carbon materials were successfully developed: prebaked anode coke and energy storage-specific carbon materials. In the first five months of the statistical cycle, the output of the two new products reached 49,600 tons, accounting for 85.6% of total petroleum coke shipments. The transformation upgraded petroleum coke from a low-value by-product of crude oil refining to a high-margin customized special carbon material.
From zero infrastructure to large-scale refined oil supply, Sinopec Cangzhou Petrochemical has delivered stable economic and social outputs over five decades. By its 50th anniversary in 2021, the company recorded cumulative operating revenue of RMB 253.9 billion, supplied 47.33 million tons of clean refined oil products for northern China’s transportation and industrial sectors, and paid aggregated taxes and fees of RMB 46.716 billion. It has become a core pillar supporting Cangzhou’s regional industrial economy and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei energy security.
Between 2021 and 2022, amid fluctuating international crude oil prices and pandemic-related operational pressures, the company processed 4.7677 million tons of crude and feedstock oil. It supplied 1.5725 million tons of gasoline and 1.6407 million tons of diesel to the public market with a 100% product qualification rate. Within the two years, operating revenue reached RMB 29.556 billion and net profit hit RMB 843 million. 2021 marked the best annual operational performance in the enterprise’s history.
To adapt to China’s dual carbon goals, Cangzhou Petrochemical set up a special leading group and dedicated working team for transformation development. It clarified two core strategic directions: upgrading traditional refining business and promoting two industrial restructurings: oil-to-chemical conversion and oil-to-special material conversion with low capital costs.
In the emerging hydrogen energy sector, the enterprise seized Cangzhou’s regional hydrogen industrial layout opportunities. Leveraging Sinopec’s proprietary hydrogen refining technology and self-produced by-product hydrogen from refining processes, it constructed a hydrogen refueling and supply center, which was officially put into operation on March 27, 2025. The facility supports the completion of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei interregional hydrogen energy corridor and fills the regional gap of stable industrial hydrogen supply.
From barren saline-alkali wasteland in 1971 to a 3.5-million-ton intelligent green refinery today, Sinopec Cangzhou Petrochemical has completed five decades of steady transformation. Driven by dual engines of technological innovation and green development, the state-owned refinery will continue to advance towards high-efficiency, ultra-low emission and digital intelligent operation, creating new milestones for high-quality development in North China’s petrochemical industry.
