Under the background of a fourth wave of industrial revolution and a period of worldwide energy transformation, deepening the reforms in the oil and gas industry system is of great significance. After reviewing the achievements and summarizing the problems of the oil and gas industry in China, this paper lays emphasis on the key aspects of this new round of deepening reforms, and holds the position that this reform, based on the implementation of the national energy strategy, covers the entire oil and gas industry chain by liberalizing market access, reforming market mechanisms, and strengthening management. The reform will bring far-reaching effects upon the entire chain and the participants of the oil and gas industry. It will help to improve the market-oriented allocation of resources, allow enterprises to interact as competitors, and enhance the national oil and gas security.

This paper expounds on the tendency of energy supervision reform with consideration to the general background of energy reform. It proposes the following aspects. First, the focus of energy supervision should shift to in-process and post supervision after cancellation or decentralization of energy project approval, Hence, the supervision over construction and completion acceptance is reinforced. Second, with the progression of marketoriented reforms in the electricity and petroleum sectors, relevant energy authorities should strengthen supervision on key aspects in the electricity and petroleum sectors, particularly by way of specific supervision and problem supervision, in order to keep the market fair, open and transparent. Third, innovative supervision modes should be adopted to improve supervision performance, so as to realize effective supervision and finally achieve standardized and normalized energy supervision. These proposals represent both the challenges and tasks that the supervision authorities face but also highlight important chances to realize the energy supervision revolution. Energy enterprises should continuously update themselves on the reforms and actions of energy supervision in order to meet the compliance requirements of construction and operation.

In recent years, due to low oil prices, resource countries have been carrying out oil & gas industry reforms and accelerating structural reform of their energy industry. At the supply side, taxes have been reduced; at the comsumption side, taxes are on the rise. These resource countries have also opened up their oil and gas sectors in the hopes of attracting more domestic and foreign capital. With the Paris Agreement coming into effect in 2016, green and low-carbon development has become the consensus of global energy development. Although the development of clean energy has currently slowed down because of low oil prices, clean energy will be the world's common direction of development in the long run. Currently, countries continue to support the development of clean energy, although the manners of their support are changing.

After more than 30 years of rapid growth, the Chinese economy has entered the "new normal" of moderately high growth. Due to the effects of multiple factors, the international oil price has remained consistently low. The low oil price has exerted critical effects on international natural gas investment. At the same time, the market-oriented price mechanism of natural gas in China is gradually taking shape; the concept of low carbon development is widely advocated; and the use of natural gas gains popularity in the city. Such factors provide great opportunities for investment in the natural gas market of China, including boiler coal-to-gas transformation, natural gas distributed energy and natural gas vehicles. However, risks also exist, such as the lower competitiveness of natural gas, its excess production capacity and dwindling consumption in some gas consumption industries, an insufficient driving force for facilitating the coal-to-gas transformation of industrial fuel users, reverse substitution of "coal in place of gas" in some enterprises, nontransparent costs of the downstream link of the natural gas price chain, and mismatches and nonsynchronous adjustments in natural gas prices and electricity prices.

Along with worldwide Internet boom, China's Internet industry is also thriving and has achieved remarkable success. Beyond that, industry integration between the Internet and other fields, such as finance, retail and advertising, is also eye-taking, as it has fostered a novel industry chain structure and business model. With an aim to realize the transformation and upgrading of conventional industry, the Chinese government has proposed ‘Internet plus’ to encourage the combination of the Internet and conventional sectors. As one of the most important and complex conventional industries, the oil and gas (O&G in abbreviation) industry is also seeking the opportunity to actively cooperate with the Internet. However, after analysis of the differences between the particularities of the O&G and Internet industry from an economics perspective, a comprehensive combination of these two seems less promising, but adopting Internet related technologies to improve the performance of the O&G industry is feasible.