The green development of oil and gas resource-based cities is not only a necessary choice to address resource depletion, protect the ecological environment, promote economic transformation, and improve residents’ quality of life but also a crucial approach to ensuring long-term, stable, and sustainable urban economic development. This paper constructs an evaluation index system for the green development of oil-and-gas resource-based cities based on the DPSIR model. The system includes five sub-systems: driving forces, pressures, status, impacts, and responses. By utilizing the entropy weight TOPSIS model and obstacle degree model, this study evaluates and analyzes the level of green development as well as obstacle factors in 17 oil-and-gas resource-based prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2021. The findings indicate that: (1) Overall, the green development level of oil and gas resource-based cities is relatively low, with significant regional disparities. (2) Both the driving force system and pressure system generally exhibit a declining trend in terms of green development level, while the state system shows improvement over time; meanwhile, both the influence system and response system demonstrate fluctuations. (3) Major obstacles faced by oil-and-gas resource-based cities include per capita green space availability, accessibility of public transport vehicles per 10k people, coverage area per capita for urban roads, R&D expenditure proportion in GDP, as well as social security subsidies proportion in general public budget expenditure. Based on these evaluation results and analysis outcomes, it is recommended that city governments optimize their policy systems, prioritize training programs for attracting talents specializing in green industries, and enhance efficiency regarding urban green development.