On April 29, 2026, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources announced a historic milestone: during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021–2025), the country discovered 225 new large and medium-sized oil and gas fields, including 13 giant oilfields of over 100 million tonnes and 26 giant gas fields exceeding 100 billion cubic metres.
Total investment reached nearly 450 billion yuan (around US$62 billion).
These discoveries pushed China’s crude oil output to a record 216 million tonnes in 2025, with natural gas production exceeding 260 billion cubic metres.
This is far more than a statistical triumph. It marks a strategic shift in global energy geopolitics, accelerates the decline of the petrodollar, and lays the foundation for the petroyuan.
For Africa and the Global South, China’s model offers a replicable blueprint for resource sovereignty, local value addition, and strategic autonomy.
China’s new oil and gas resources are concentrated in the Tarim, Ordos, and Bohai Bay basins. Proven petroleum and gas reserves rose by 51.7 percent and 44.2% compared with the previous five-year plan.
Unconventional resources — shale oil, shale gas, deep coal-bed methane — and deep-water projects have become growth engines.
More important than scale is technology. China has mastered 10,000-meter ultra-deep drilling and helium extraction from natural gas, ending near-total external dependence.
As officials emphasise, China has placed energy security firmly in its own hands.
For a country long reliant on external energy supplies, every barrel produced domestically reduces exposure to chokepoints, dollar weaponisation, and supply coercion.
The petrodollar system, built on the 1974 U.S.-Saudi agreement, is breaking down.
The United States is now a net energy exporter. Sanctions have pushed major buyers and sellers toward non-dollar trade.
Saudi Arabia accepts yuan for oil; Russia trades in rubles and yuan with China. Iran has linked safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz to yuan payments.
China’s domestic oil and gas expansion strengthens this transition.
Lower import dependency means stronger negotiating power to push yuan settlement, build alternative payment systems, and sustain long-term financial statecraft.
China’s success does not come from superior geology. It comes from strategic state investment, technological self-reliance, and a determination to control the full value chain.
By contrast, most African resource economies remain trapped in a colonial-era model: raw material exports, minimal local processing, profits extracted by foreign firms, and little value added at home.
The way forward is now proven across Africa:
- Zimbabwe banned raw lithium exports and attracted over US$1 billion in processing investment. It will ban lithium concentrate exports in 2027 to force battery-grade refining.
- Nigeria tied mining licenses to local processing and saw mining revenue surge sixfold in 2024, with major lithium and battery projects underway.
- DRC imposed cobalt export quotas to reduce smuggling, stabilise prices, and strengthen bargaining power.
- Zambia legislated local content requirements to force procurement and employment from domestic businesses.
These examples prove that resource sovereignty is achieved through policy, not geology.
For every African oil, mineral, and gas exporter, the foundation must be statutory local processing and local content.
- Angola must expand domestic refining and force downstream integration.
- Nigeria must enforce local content across oil and mining.
- Zimbabwe must complete its lithium value chain to cell manufacturing.
- South Africa must refine platinum group metals and manganese for green tech locally.
- Botswana must replicate its diamond partnership model for copper and nickel.
- Somalia must build governance first, before offshore oil development.
- DRC must use its cobalt dominance to secure onshore refining joint ventures.
China’s 225 oil and gas discoveries are a global turning point. They show that structural energy dependence can be overcome with long-term strategy and technology.
They weaken the petrodollar and expand space for the petroyuan.
For Africa, the message is unambiguous: exporting raw materials without local processing is not development — it is continued dependency.
Local content laws, processing mandates, strategic export controls, and tough bargaining with multinationals are not radical; they are the basic tools of economic sovereignty.
The window of opportunity is open but closing.
African nations that act now will turn resources into prosperity. Those that delay will remain exporters of raw potential, not creators of real value.
*Saxon Zvina is the principal consultant at Skyworld Consultancy Services.saxon@skyworld.co.zw | X: @saxonzvina2