Fueling a Nation with Analytics

China’s demand for natural gas consumption nearly doubled in just five years from 2010 to 2015. To ensure it could keep pace with this demand, CNPC – China’s largest oil and natural gas producer and supplier – partnered with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Tsinghua University, led by Prof. Max Shen, to develop and implement a new software that optimized the country’s natural gas pipeline, with 5,000 gas sources and 20,000 customers.

The software replaced an outdated manual system, which, due to the increasing size and complexity of China’s natural gas pipeline, was experiencing a large measure of error, including increased costs and wasted resources. Since implementing the automated system, CNPC has realized approximately $330 million in direct savings, and the increased efficiency of the pipeline has enabled it to delay further pipeline expansions saving billions of additional dollars.