Sinopec Rips Out Fuel Tanks in Shanghai, Replaces Them With BYD's 1,500 kW Flash Chargers
An oil giant just pulled its own gasoline tanks out of the ground and dropped battery packs into the hole. Sinopec, China's biggest fuel retailer, gutted a Shanghai gas station at 1209 Huqingping Road and turned the whole site into an EV-only charging hub stacked with BYD's megawatt-class flash chargers.
This was not a case of bolting a couple of chargers onto the edge of the forecourt. Sinopec removed the underground fuel storage tanks entirely. Where they used to sit, there are now second-generation BYD Blade batteries that buffer the chargers and deliver the burst of power a 1,500 kW session demands.
The hub is the first site run jointly under the BYD-Sinopec partnership signed in June. It runs six of BYD's "T"-shaped chargers, each with two cables, for 12 charging spots laid out like the pump islands they replaced. The point is muscle memory: pull in, plug into an overhead dispenser, leave in a few minutes.
The Numbers Behind the Speed
BYD rates the flash chargers at up to 1,500 kW on a single connector. On a car with the second-gen Blade battery, that works out to 10 to 70 percent charge in about five minutes, and 10 to 97 percent in roughly nine. Cold weather stretches the run to about 12 minutes at minus 30 degrees Celsius.
Those figures helped BYD's flash-charging technology win Germany's International Paul Pietsch Award on August 11, the first time the prize, established in 1989, has gone to a Chinese company. German automotive media group Motor Presse Stuttgart organizes the award, and its media network, including auto motor und sport, picked the winner. ChinaEVHome's coverage of the award notes the award emphasizes technical breakthroughs rather than sales numbers, and the charging speed was the standout.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also listed the second-gen Blade Battery and ultra-fast charging among landmark national innovations at a July press conference, alongside controlled reusable rocket recovery technology. That is the company's domestic stamp of approval.
How a Gas Station Delivers Megawatt Charging
A 1,500 kW charger drawing straight from the grid would need a substation-grade connection, and no ordinary gas station has one. BYD's answer is storage between the grid and the car. Each charger is backed by four Blade LFP battery packs holding 169-185 kWh, and those buffers deliver the megawatt burst while the site trickle-charges from a modest grid hookup. Electrek's report on the Shanghai conversion describes the site layout in detail, including the rest area and health monitoring station added for drivers waiting out a charge.
The math shows why this matters. A Gen I flash charger's power unit pulls roughly 280 kW from the grid through two AC-DC modules, while its DC-DC modules can push out around 1,050 kW. The gap comes from the battery buffer discharging at a much higher rate than it charges. BYD's 200 kWh BESS charges at 200 kW and discharges at 800 kW, a 4C discharge rate that most rival systems cannot match. For comparison, VW's Elli Flexpole Plus buffer charges at 40 kW and discharges at 210 kW.
The Gen II units spotted in the field go further. A leaked nameplate shows a charging host rated at a maximum output of 2,100 kW from a 584 kW grid connection, with two 200 kWh BESS units instead of one. BYD Europe's director of EV charging has confirmed the direction of travel without confirming the final specs, and analysts who have studied the teardown photos expect sites to grow from three charge posts with six points to four or five posts with eight to ten points.
The Network Behind the Hype
Sinopec's scale is the real story. The state-controlled retailer runs more than 30,000 service stations, over 14,000 charging and battery-swap stations, and serves roughly 20 million customers a day. Every one of those forecourts is a candidate for the same conversion, and the company says similar changes are coming to other stations.
BYD has its own numbers moving fast. It had built 7,018 flash-charging stations across 325 Chinese cities as of the end of June, and it targets 20,000 in China by the end of 2026. Abroad, it wants about 6,000 stations by the same deadline, including roughly 3,000 across Europe. Its first flash-charging site in Germany opened in May, and 300 units are planned for the UK, as Electrifying.com reported in June.
The two companies signed an industrial and capital cooperation framework on June 3 covering the charging network, integrated services, and supply chain. Sinopec chairman Hou Qijun framed the deal as a push to "jointly promote the green transformation and upgrading of China's transportation network." BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu has been pitching a "Flash Charging China" strategy built on the second-gen Blade battery, and BYD executive Li Yunfei has been posting the Shanghai rollout on Weibo.
What This Means for the Rest of the World
Western charging operators should study the buffered-battery design, because it answers the cost objection that stalls megawatt charging elsewhere. The usual assumption is that a megawatt hub demands a rebuilt grid connection, and that is exactly what BYD says you do not need. Put a battery between the grid and the car, pull 100 kW in, push 1,500 kW out, and a gas station lot becomes a megawatt hub without waiting years for a utility upgrade.
The catch is that only cars engineered for it can use the full speed, and outside China that is almost nobody today. The second-gen Blade battery, the high-voltage platform, and the charger all have to be present. Chinese buyers of the Han L and Tang L already get the pairing, and the super e-platform launched with silicon carbide power chips and peripherals to match.
Read Sinopec's move as a hedge rather than a conversion of faith. It sells fuel to 20 million people a day, and it can see China's passenger market going majority-electric. It would rather cannibalize its own forecourts than watch BYD or anyone else build a rival network on new land and take the traffic with it. Owning 30,000 of the best-located plots of real estate is the moat, and the battery-in-a-hole approach is how it defends it.
The Shanghai site is one storefront on a much bigger shelf. BYD is deploying more charging power per month than Tesla's Supercharger network adds, and its domestic station count has doubled in about a year. The oil business that spent a decade fighting electrification is now tearing out its own fuel tanks to host it, which tells you how fast the ground is shifting in China's EV market.
What Comes Next
Watch the 20,000-station target. BYD hit 7,018 in June, so the second half of 2026 needs roughly 13,000 new sites, a pace that only makes sense with partners like Sinopec, Xiaoju Charging, and LongShine building at scale. Xiaoju and LongShine committed to 10,000 and 5,000 units respectively under a June 2025 agreement, and those numbers are now folding into the same ecosystem.
China's charging records are falling in public, too. CATL has shown an 8C battery for light commercial vehicles that reaches 80 percent in six minutes and 48 seconds, and EV Infrastructure News tracked what that means for commercial fleets. Geely is pushing its own megawatt-class hardware. The country that built the world's biggest fast-charging network is now competing on how quickly a car can refill, and the bar moves every few months.
For EV buyers outside China, the lesson is about timeframes rather than specs. The technology exists today, the infrastructure playbook is proven on 7,000 sites, and the economics work without a grid rebuild. What is missing is the fleet of cars that can use it, and that gap is closing model by model. When megawatt charging lands in Europe and Southeast Asia at scale, it will arrive as a finished system rather than a pilot.
The Electrek report notes that this is the image the oil industry spent billions trying to delay: a state petroleum company digging its own gasoline tanks out of the ground and dropping battery packs in the hole. That image is now real, it is in Shanghai, and it is expanding. BYD's flash-charging rollout, and Sinopec's decision to host it, turn the charging race from a question of whether into a question of how fast.