In order to ensure the safe operation of equipment and improve the efficiency of oil exploitation, the fault location detection of petrochemical equipment based on BP neural network is studied. The BP neural network is used to construct the framework of the detection system, the pulse coding module is designed for the whole operation process of the petrochemical equipment, and the voltage quarantine circuit and frequency measurement circuit are constructed. In the software part, the BP neural network is used to construct the mathematical model, and the coordinate position is calculated by the activation function and the weighted method to realize the position detection of the equipment fault point. In the experiment, three groups of different types of petrochemical equipment were used as test objects, and the fault location was detected from the setting of noise conditions and distance conditions respectively. The results show that the system has high detection accuracy and can be used in complex petroleum engineering.