Chapter 300: The Coal Preparation Plant

I never thought the navigation capacity of the Nandu River would be so pathetic. Everyone present was utterly disappointed. What kind of boat could you even play with in such shallow water?

Even using Ming dynasty canal transport boats for coal would require some dredging of the channel. As for large-scale river-sea combined transport, it would require a comprehensive dredging and regulation of the entire lower reaches. Even if the entire island of Hainan were in the hands of the Transmigration Group, with an open supply of materials and manpower, the sheer scale of the engineering and the massive investment would likely occupy a place in the five-year plan.

“So, let’s just stick to the small boats and try to find a solution.”

“Let’s install engines on the transport boats. If they’re faster, they can make more trips—12 boats making one extra trip means an additional 60 tons of transport capacity!”

“We can install a small steam engine. The steam engines for this kind of small boat are not difficult to manufacture now,” Jiang Ye said. “And we can use Li Di’s small steam engine as a model for imitation.”

Installing a steam engine would naturally mean sacrificing some payload, but if it allowed for more trips and increased the total transport volume, the price was worth paying.

“The standard payload of a transport boat is 5 tons. If we add a steam engine and the coal to fuel it, the payload loss will be too great. I think it’s better to build a tugboat,” Wang Luobin said. “We can make the steam engine more powerful and have it tow a dozen small barges. The old-fashioned small flat-bottomed barges from the English canals would be very suitable—their shape and size are like a rectangular open-top box, the structure is as simple as it gets, and the draft is very shallow.”

The final decision was to immediately start imitating the small steam engine and build small barges. In addition, a coal preparation plant would be built at the Jiazi Coal Mine.

This was Luo Duo’s proposal. Since the current transport capacity was tight, why not think in reverse?

“Tang Menglong’s report to the Industrial and Energy Committee clearly states that the lignite content is only 40%, and some of it is not suitable for coking. The majority of the output is coal gangue and other low-calorific-value coal. It’s better to sort it before transporting. We can just ship out the lignite suitable for coking and leave the rest at the Jiazi Coal Mine for now. There’s plenty of wasteland in this era anyway.”

“Actually, coal gangue has many uses, at least it can be used to burn cement…”

“Compared to cement, isn’t coking more important?” Luo Duo said. “Besides, after we occupy Qiongshan, we can develop and utilize it on-site. There’s no need to haul it all to Lin’gao to pollute the environment.”

“Why not just make coke directly at the Jiazi mine? I’ve seen the Kailuan-style coke ovens at Bopu. The structure is very simple, not much technical content.”

“Ji Tui Si would kill you,” Wang Luobin said. “Wouldn’t the coal coking combined production equipment he painstakingly brought from the 21st century be wasted? The power of that thing is the comprehensive utilization of coking. It directly processes the tar and waste gas produced during coking to create various by-products. If you move the coke ovens to the Jiazi mine, what will he do?”

In the past, the Kailuan ovens were used mainly because the supply of coking coal was unstable. The combined equipment, once started, could not be stopped and started at will, so it had never been put into formal operation. Now with a stable supply channel, the highly polluting and wasteful Kailuan ovens had become the first batch of backward technology to be listed for elimination by the Planning Committee.

Ma Qianzhu readily approved the Jiazi Coal Mine upgrade plan proposed by the Industrial and Energy Committee and allocated the necessary raw materials and various equipment—establishing a stable coal supply system was now the top priority.

Xiao Gui and others, who were in charge of imitating the steam engine, first “requisitioned” the American-made small steam engine that Li Di had placed in the shipyard workshop. Under Li Di’s pained gaze, the small steam engine was dismantled into pieces, each one marked and measured for reverse engineering.

“The industrial design of the Americans is really not bad!” Xiao Gui praised, looking at the parts scattered on the floor. “The structure is so ingenious.”

“Can we imitate it?” Ran Yao asked.

“We can’t make it exactly the same. Its processing technology and materials are beyond our reach. But our requirements are also lower. We can make the parts a bit larger, and it should be close enough.”

While Xiao Gui and Zhou Bili were busy imitating the steam engine, the Jiazi Coal Mine’s coal preparation plant began construction. Lin Baiguang felt immense pressure. In his original plan, the Jiazi Coal Mine was just a small coal pit. A few hundred people would secretly dig some coal, and then a boat would transport it to the Hai family’s pier for loading. He never expected the project to become so unexpectedly large.

“If this goes on, won’t the Jiazi Coal Mine be clearly labeled with the words ‘Australians’?” Lin Baiguang complained.

The coal preparation plant was set up near the storage yard of the Jiazi pier. There was plenty of water here for washing coal—coal washing is a water-intensive industry, requiring 5 tons of water for every ton of coal. Discharging the wastewater into the river was also very convenient. There was no advanced technology in coal washing; the equipment had low technical content. It was nothing more than crushers, jigs, dewatering screens, and the like, which were not difficult to manufacture. The main coal washing facility was the sluice.

The power for the coal preparation plant was a steam engine. The Industrial and Energy Committee transported a second boiler and two 50-horsepower Mozi Type II steam engines to the Jiazi Coal Mine. They were all installed at the Jiazi pier. One drove the water pump, and the other drove the coal washing equipment. The boiler used the washed coal gangue as fuel. The plant was designed to process 250,000 tons of raw coal annually.

“Since we’re giving the Jiazi pier a steam engine, we might as well send a steam crane over. The loading and unloading speed at the pier will be much faster. Otherwise, the steam from the boiler will be wasted,” Ma Qianzhu said.

Zhan Wuya said, “We’ll have to add a whole set of equipment at the Hai family’s pier as well. Otherwise, one end will be clear while the other is blocked.”

“The Hai family’s pier is not a big problem. We can use local labor and human wave tactics. Labor is cheap anyway,” Ma Qianzhu thought for a moment. “It’s not that I’m reluctant to part with a few pieces of equipment, but that place is, after all, a core area of Ming rule. Making a fuss with steam engines and boilers would be too blatant.”

Soon, a steel monster with an iron arm, constantly spewing white steam, stood on the bank of the Nandu River. The pumping station by the river used the power of the steam engine to draw water from the river and supply a large amount of water to the entire coal preparation plant. Behind it, a three-story building was erected, with long wooden troughs on top—this was the coal preparation plant. Raw coal was lifted by a steam-powered winch to the coal bunker on the third floor, and then from the third floor, it went through a series of processes including screening, washing, and jigging… Finally, the clean coal was discharged at the bottom. The coal gangue and low-quality coal were discharged from the sluice in the middle. The black water from the coal washing was discharged into a settling pond to settle before being discharged into the Nandu River—a large amount of coal slurry could be recovered from the settling pond. This coal slurry had a high water content and took a long time to dry. Wang Luobin used its high water content to set up a coal briquette workshop here, using a steam engine to drive a briquette machine to make honeycomb briquettes.

Although the amount of dark lignite regularly transported from the Jiazi Coal Mine was still small due to limited transport capacity, it finally solved the instability of the coal supply from Guangdong. Ji Tui Si of the Chemical Industry Department could finally confidently start up his complete set of coal coking equipment, which had been built but had not been in formal operation, and run it at full capacity for continuous production.

The formal commissioning of the complete set of coal coking equipment brought a leap forward in the development of the chemical industry. The simplest change was that the traditional sulfuric acid workshop was shut down. The highly polluting and inconsistent quality of the traditional sulfuric acid was replaced by industrially manufactured sulfuric acid. Other by-products such as gasoline, diesel, asphalt, phenol, toluene, crude benzene, various solvent oils, lubricating oils, and paraffin also began to be produced one after another. In particular, lubricating oil and paraffin were a boon to the machinery industry—the lubricating properties of coconut oil dregs were limited, after all. And paraffin, in addition to its industrial uses, also gave the Ministry of Light Industry an opportunity to create a brand new civilian product—modern candles. Candles made mainly of paraffin were not only cheaper than traditional grease candles but also much brighter. The treated cotton wicks could also be gradually burned away with the candle, preventing the formation of a candle flower that would affect combustion and produce black smoke and a bad smell. As for gasoline and diesel, although the output was extremely limited, it also brought a glimmer of hope to the internal combustion engines whose fuel reserves were gradually depleting—at least some vehicles would not be reduced to the strange appearance of having a gas bag on top.

“Now we have the firewood for steelmaking, we’re just waiting for the rice to cook,” Ji Wusheng of the Ministry of Steel Industry said at a five-year plan implementation work meeting in early December. “The third phase of the steel plant expansion will begin in April 1630.”

The second phase of the steel plant had been fully completed in November 1629. The second phase mainly focused on improving the supporting facilities for steel smelting, installing rolling equipment, and increasing the production capacity of converter steelmaking. The steel plant’s production was still mainly based on refining imported pig iron, and it had not established its own pig iron industry. The third phase would build two new blast furnaces, two open-hearth furnaces, and a new iron ore dressing plant. The ore from Tiandu was of high grade and could be directly used for steelmaking. The Ministry of Steel Industry planned to sort the ore, use the best grade ore for direct steelmaking, and the next best for making pig iron.

The designed blast furnace had a volume of 125 cubic meters and could produce 50 tons of pig iron per day, which was already at the level of the mid-19th century. With two blast furnaces operating simultaneously, the annual pig iron output would be 35,000 tons. This figure made everyone’s eyes light up. 35,000 tons of pig iron! You know, during the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s pig iron output in 1720 was only 25,000 tons.

“This is simply a mountain of steel and a sea of iron!” Wang Luobin was very excited. With such a huge pig iron production capacity, steel would no longer be the bottleneck restricting Lin’gao’s industrialization. Railways, iron-hulled ships, all-steel frame large-scale factory buildings, reinforced concrete buildings, complete sets of industrial equipment… all would be within reach.

With a massive supply of steel, the Transmigration Group’s industrial production could finally break away from its current small-scale, almost workshop-like scale and embark on the path of true large-scale industrial production.