Faculty of Chemical Engineering is the largest faculty in CUPB and the largest in the area of petrochemical engineering in China. When the Chemical Engineering Department and some other departments in Tsinghua University were incorporated into Beijing Petroleum College in 1953, the Chemical Engineering Department was the largest and the strongest department in the college, and was renamed as the Department of Oil Refinery. The Department of Oil Refinery attracted from all over the country a large number of well-known professors in chemistry or chemical engineering, including Ying Fu, Jin Zhang, Chi Wu, Benxi Cao, Yajie Zhu, Guanghua Yang, Fu Shen, Tianmin Guo, Huaizu Zhang, Heng Dai, Jialin Qian, and Shixiong Lin, etc. Very soon the Department became an important place for educating specialized people for the petrochemical industries of our country as well as for conducting scientific research. In 1969 the Department, along with the Institute, moved to Dongying, Shandong Province, and took its name as the Department of Oil Refinery of East-China Petroleum Institute. When the University of Petroleum (Beijing) was established in 1988 the Department was reassembled on the basis of Beijing Graduate School of East-China Petroleum Institute. In 1991 its was renamed as School of Petrochemical Engineering. In 1999 the School was renamed as Faculty of Chemical Engineering.

At present the faculty has 1 department and 5 research centers:
1. Department of Chemical Engineering;
2. Oil Refining Research Center;
3. Chemical Engineering and Equipment Research Center;
4. Oil & Natural Gas Catalysis Research Center;
5. Environmental Engineering Research Center;
6. Applied Chemistry Research Center.