Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum (Group) Co. (YCPC) in northwest China has achieved a major milestone in the country's energy sector, shattering its own production records by surpassing 20 million tonnes in crude oil and natural gas production.
YCPC, one of China's largest oil and natural gas producers, reported production of approximately 11.7 million tonnes of crude oil and 10.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas as of Saturday.
The company's production operations are primarily concentrated in the cities of Yan'an and Yulin in the northern part of Shaanxi.
After more than a century of extraction, most of the remaining reserves are unconventional, making further extraction increasingly challenging
To address these challenges, YCPC has focused on leveraging technology to efficiently explore oil and gas layers within complex geological formations, while accelerating its digital transformation.
"By integrating digital oilfields, gas fields, pipelines, and engineering processes into the exploration and extraction process, we can reduce both exploration costs and carbon emissions," said Wang Xiangzeng, principal scientist of YCPC.
"We remain committed to our core oil and natural gas business, with efforts to expand production capacity, including an increase of 1.227 million tonnes of oil and 2.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas," said Zhang Kaiyong, chairman of YCPC.
Chinese energy giant exceeds 20 mln tonnes of oil, gas output in 2024
The ongoing probe revolving around the late U.S. financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has become a powerful symbol of systemic dysfunction in Western political and judicial systems and has significantly eroded public trust, according to analysts.
In the latest episode of the China Global Television Network (CGTN) opinion show 'The Point with Liu Xin' which aired Wednesday, experts debated the ongoing controversies surrounding the latest release of documents in the so-called Epstein files.
The newly-released files totaling some three million pages have sparked serious scrutiny across the Atlantic, prompting the resignation of several political figures over their ties to Epstein, who died under mysterious circumstances in a maximum-security facility in 2019.
Han Hua, the co-founder and secretary general of the Beijing Club for International Dialogue, a Chinese think tank, noted how Epstein, in spite of his conviction, had seemingly built up an expansive network of the rich and powerful, and said the sense of "elite impunity" and the seeming disregard for morality among many of those involved has dealt a huge blow to Western democracy, which is supposedly built upon the basis of the rule of law.
"Right after 2008, Epstein certainly has built an even stronger and much larger Western elite circle including politicians, including academia, including the political and the religious figures like the Dalai Lama. So this actually indicates the 'bankruptcy' of the Western democracy from the moral high ground, from the rule of law. It is systematic damage to the whole system and also to the judicial and legal system. And they are building a circle that can protect Epstein and the elites in this circle from getting [allegations], from getting legally punished, so that the cases [could become] even larger. And there are so many victims, there is no perspective with regard to the victims to be protected," she said.
Josef Mahoney, a professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University, said the ongoing Epstein saga has deeply flamed public distrust, exposing uncomfortable truths about how power operates behind closed doors.
"We've also seen, as has been raised, the question about whether or not the system can be trusted. There's intense distrust now in the system. But at the same time, I think the other point to be raised about moral authority is that what you see are leaders, figures from different fields, from across the political spectrum, essentially working together in a way, so they represent and they stoke divisions in society that exploit and suppress the people. But at the same time we see them, the left wing, the right wing, the center, all sort of having these extreme parties or relationships with each other, which really begs the question of whether or not there's a true democracy to begin with," he said.
Epstein case sows deeper distrust in Western politics, judicial systems: analysts
