GBase Database Powers PipeChina's Smart Oil & Gas Blueprint, Ushering a New Era of Energy IT Innovation

Across China, oil and gas pipelines stretch like giant steel dragons, winding across the land to deliver energy resources to countless households. Every inch of these pipelines tells a story of engineering marvels.

GBase Database: Securing Oil & Gas Energy Transport

Behind this miracle lies the dedicated efforts of China Oil & Gas Pipeline Network Corporation (PipeChina).

Established in late 2019 to enhance intensive transmission and service capabilities, PipeChina focuses on investment, construction, and operation of trunk oil and gas pipeline networks, gas storage, and peak-shaving infrastructure. It is responsible for interconnecting trunk pipelines and linking with social pipelines, scheduling and operating the national oil and gas pipeline network, and periodically publicly disclosing remaining transmission and storage capacities to ensure fair access to infrastructure for all users.

As a new player among China's energy “national teams,” PipeChina embraced digital transformation as a long-term strategy from day one. To safeguard information security while controlling overall costs, PipeChina decided to build new business systems on domestic databases and gradually replace the legacy database layer of existing systems—enhancing technological independence and controllability to empower its business development.

The challenge was clear: a massive central state-owned enterprise, freshly inaugurated with many IT systems to be built from scratch, central to national energy security, with limited previous use of domestic software…

Many domestic database vendors quickly responded and actively participated in early-stage technical discussions and selection testing. GBase (General Data Technology) understood this was a rare opportunity to support IT application innovation (Xinchuang) for an energy central SOE, and joined the evaluation as well.

In 2021, GBase won the tender for PipeChina’s general-purpose relational database procurement project with the highest overall evaluation score, becoming the primary supplier of centralized database software for PipeChina.

This milestone marked GBase’s comprehensive support for PipeChina’s IT system development, pioneering an industry-wide deployment of a domestic database in the oil and petrochemical sector.

Over the following two years, GBase’s technical team worked closely with PipeChina’s various system integrators—actively performing adaptation, joint tuning, and performance optimization. Through relentless effort, 15 information systems were smoothly migrated to GBase Database, including oil and gas pipeline SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), human resources, archives, financial statements, IP resource management, the “Three Major and One Large” (major decisions, appointments, projects, and large fund usage) management system, and audit systems.

Among these, the SCADA system serves as the central nervous system for long-distance pipeline production coordination—enabling centralized dispatch, remote monitoring, maintenance coordination, and network optimization. For years, it was dominated by foreign software giants; achieving a domestic replacement for SCADA is therefore critical to China’s energy security.

The stability, functionality, and performance of the domestic database withstood PipeChina’s stringent operational scenarios. On the Gang-Zao (Dagang–Zaozhuang) pipeline, GBase Database replaced the foreign database in the SCADA system, leveraging its high concurrency, reliability, and stability to meet the data acquisition and monitoring demands of a large-scale control center.

Replacing PipeChina’s SCADA system at the database level realizes independent, controllable technology in oil and gas pipeline control. This is pivotal to forming the “One Network for the Nation” and ensuring the security of the main arteries of energy transmission.

To date, PipeChina has deployed nearly a thousand GBase Database instances and plans to further accelerate the development of an intelligent, digital modern oil and gas pipeline network based on domestic hardware and software, striving to become a world-class energy infrastructure operator with Chinese characteristics.

Beyond supporting PipeChina, GBase Database deeply supports the digital and intelligent transformation of China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec), deploying a data lake for the upstream segment on headquarters cloud infrastructure, enabling smart oilfield pilot projects, data governance data lake projects at Shengli Oilfield, and smart oilfield construction at the offshore production plant.

State Grid’s cloud-based dispatch center, PetroChina’s safety inspection platform, oilfield production monitoring systems, power plant monitoring systems, and automatic inspection and centralized equipment control for renewable energy substations… GBase Database is powering a growing list of energy information systems. Node by node, GBase Database weaves a dense data fabric that safeguards China’s energy security.