Recon Technology Ltd. (NASDAQ:RCON) Is Leading The Way In The Chinese Crude Refinement Automation Industry. As energy needs increase throughout the world there has been a continual push to develop new ways to find and extract scarce resources, such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Concurrently, engineers and companies the world over have looked to improve the methods to refine them once they are extracted. The biggest consumer of oil and gas in the world is the United States but China is rapidly gaining in this statistic. China falls in second and third for oil and gas consumption, respectively, in 2013 according to the CIA World Factbook and became the world's largest net importer of oil in 2014 according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). As demand from China's population grows, the need to find more efficient means to produce and refine energy sources becomes even more critical.