Challenges for Sinopec were increasing global competition and the contradiction of development and environmental protection, as well as the constraint of petroleum resources. Also, the profits were dropping.  
When Sinopec initiated a project to build a new integrated oil refinery capable of processing 10 million tons of crude oil per year in Qingdao in 2005, the company was facing a number of challenges, both technical and commercial. The cost of oil on the world markets was increasing and the booming Chinese economy was generating strong growth in demand for refinery and petrochemical products. The growing awareness of safety and environmental protection issues in China also meant that any new plant would need to comply with new, tightening regulations. Sinopec needed to build a refinery that would compete with the best in the world and build it quickly. 

Siemens provided a comprehensive solution through the Advanced Process Control (APC), including the following details:

• Providing a set of an advanced process control system to keep stable production, increase products qualities and quantities
• Siemens info security solution helps the customer to protect information security and to sure the production operation long term running safely. The digitalization solution provide customer with a digital twin of the plant and automatic plant maintains tools to increase the maintain quality and reduce the people
  
• SIEPA (Siemens Predictive Analytics) is a key factor to become a smart plant and the pioneer of real usage of AI technologies in the process industry. As required by the customer Sinopec, SIEPA (formerly EPA V2.0) is now an official module for Asset Management and part of Sinopec’s Intelligent Plant Project 2.0 for the Qingdao refinery. The application consists of two major functionalities: Risk prediction/pre-alert (based on machine learning) and advanced diagnosis (based on natural language processing). By integrating SIEPA into their work, it helps Sinopec to improve efficiency and reliability for their operation currently as well as to improve intelligence level of the Sinopec plant continuously