To more accurate forecast China's oil consumption, the major driving force of global new added oil demand, a new nonlinear-dynamic grey model is developed, namely NMGM (1, 1, alpha). The proposed NMGM (1, 1, alpha) upgrades the nonlinear grey model (GM) from stationary to dynamic model through effectively integrating nonlinear forecasting technique and the biological metabolism idea. The proposed NMGM (1,1, alpha), and other three existing grey models (linear GM (1,1), nonlinear GM (1,1, alpha), metabolism GM (1,1)) are run respectively to simulate and forecast Chinese oil consumption from 1990 to 2026. The simulation results show that our proposed NMGM (1, 1, alpha) are higher accurate than the other three models. In addition to better forecast energy consumption, the proposed NMGM (1, 1, alpha) also can be used to forecast in other fields. The modeling results based on the NMGM (1, 1, a) show that China oil consumption in the next decade (2017-2026) will be increased by 51%. The better forecasting Chinese oil consumption by using the proposed model can provide useful information for the researchers, policymakers and others stakeholders in Chinese and global oil market. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.