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China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for Oil and Gas: Opportunities to Strengthen Methane Mitigation

IGSD / 31 August 2026

31 August 2026 - On 17 August, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and National Energy Administration (NEA) jointly released the 15th Five-Year Plan for Oil and Gas Development (the “Oil and Gas Plan”). The Plan sets a dual agenda of strengthening energy security and advancing the sector’s green and low-carbon transition.

On methane specifically, the Oil and Gas Plan explicitly names emissions reduction as part of the green transition and introduces supporting policy tools, including carbon accounting, product carbon-footprint management, digitalization, and green trade. However, it does not set an oil-and-gas methane reduction target or a methane-intensity benchmark.

More broadly, the Plan calls for continued growth in overall domestic oil and gas production, expansion of pipeline and storage infrastructure, diversified imports, and increased use of natural gas in selected industrial, transportation, and power applications.

The Oil and Gas Plan offers a useful opening to strengthen methane mitigation across the oil and gas sector, including along the supply chain. Key opportunities include translating the Plan’s methane-reduction direction into a measurable reduction or intensity benchmark, strengthening facility-level measurement and reporting, and implementing core controls such as leak detection and repair and limits on routine venting and flaring.

The Plan’s carbon-footprint and green-trade provisions also provide a potential pathway to address methane emissions associated with imported natural gas, including through methane-intensity metrics linked to procurement or trade-related requirements. These measures would complement the broader and longer-term energy transition toward low- and zero-carbon energy.

The Plan further develops China’s broader 15th Five-Year energy strategy

The Oil and Gas Plan provides sector-specific details that complement the broader direction established in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for Building a New Energy System (the “New Energy Plan”). Key quantitative targets in the Oil and Gas Plan include:

  • During 2026–2030, add 20,000 km of long-distance oil and gas pipelines; by 2030, the national network reaches approximately 220,000 km. The 20,000-km addition is already included in the New Energy Plan; the total-network benchmark is new.
  • By 2030, the natural-gas reserve scale exceeds 13% of national consumption.
  • By 2030, LNG receiving capacity reaches 200 million tonnes per year.
  • By 2030, land-based pipeline gas import capacity reaches 114 billion cubic meters per year.
  • By 2030, CO₂ injection through carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) reaches 10 million tonnes per year.

Methane mitigation gains explicit recognition but remains largely qualitative

The Plan explicitly includes methane reduction alongside energy-efficiency improvements, increased electrification, and VOC controls as part of the sector’s green transition. Several other provisions could also support stronger methane governance: lowering sectoral carbon intensity, expanding renewable-energy deployment and electrification at oil and gas fields, building smart oil fields and pipeline networks, improving technical standards, strengthening oil-and-gas carbon-emissions accounting, and gradually establishing a carbon-footprint management system to promote green trade.

These measures create useful institutional foundations for methane measurement and management at the facility, product, and supply-chain levels. However, the Plan does not specify how its methane-reduction directions will be implemented. It does not set an absolute or intensity-based target. It also does not require direct measurement, leak detection and repair, venting and flaring controls, or verification. The significance of the methane provision will therefore depend heavily on subsequent standards, regulations, monitoring systems, and implementation measures.

The Plan creates an opportunity to address methane emissions from imported gas

The Plan calls for strengthening strategic land-based import corridors, diversifying imports, and expanding China’s participation in international oil and gas trade. This creates an opportunity to address methane emissions from imported gas, given that methane-emission intensity varies substantially across suppliers. The Plan’s provisions on carbon-footprint management and green trade offer a potential entry point for addressing these supply-chain emissions. The potential impact is substantial: modeling analysis finds that, in a scenario where China, the EU, Japan, and South Korea restrict natural-gas imports from suppliers exceeding a 0.2% supply-chain methane-intensity threshold, methane emissions associated with China’s natural-gas supply fall by about 41% in 2035 relative to the reference scenario.[1]

Additional IGSD China Resources:

[1] Ryna Cui, Jiaxun Sun, Xinzhao Cheng, Rachel Hoesly, Julie Miller, Andy G. LaFleur, Xiaopu Sun, Brinda Yarlagadda, Christoph Bertram, Gabrielle Dreyfus, Richard (“Tad”) Ferris, Nathan Hultman, Steven J. Smith, and Mengye Zhu, Reducing Methane Emissions Along Global Natural Gas Supply Chain through Import Standards, preprint posted August 13, 2026, DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10476216/v1.

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