Southwest Petroleum University is not a 2 1 1 university, but a SWPU. Its main campus is located in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and is jointly built by the Ministry of Education, Sichuan and China Petroleum Group Co., Ltd., sinopec group and China Offshore Oil Group Co., Ltd.; It is a national "double-first-class" construction university, and has been selected into the basic capacity building project of universities in the central and western regions and the national "11plan".

The school began to recruit master students on 1978, 1986 was awarded the right of doctoral degree, 1988 was approved as the first batch of national key disciplines,19/kloc-0 was approved by the state key laboratory for construction, and 1965438 set up a postdoctoral research mobile station. In 2005, it was officially renamed Southwest Petroleum University.

The school has two campuses, Chengdu and Nanchong, covering a total area of more than 3,000 mu. The school's existing disciplines cover eight disciplines, including science, engineering, management, economics, literature, law, teaching and arts, including 78 undergraduate majors with enrollment qualifications, 5 first-class disciplines with doctoral degrees, 29 first-class disciplines with doctoral degrees in two disciplines, 22 first-class disciplines with master's degrees, 89 master's degrees in two disciplines, and 1 master's interdisciplinary.