Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Maniao Industrial Zone

After the loading and unloading equipment was in place, the remaining work was to install the ore dressing plant. The Ministry of Metallurgical Industry had a set of ore dressing plant equipment brought from the old world installed in Lin’gao. To save on sea freight tonnage and to accumulate experience for future metallurgical machinery manufacturing, it was ultimately decided to install a self-made set of ore dressing equipment in Sanya.

The infrastructure construction of the ore dressing plant was completed before the year’s end. The technology of the ore dressing plant was not complicated. The General Machinery Plant had already accumulated some experience in manufacturing ore dressing equipment—it had previously built a coal washing plant for the Jiazi Coal Mine.

An ore dressing plant was more complex than a coal washing plant, and the technical requirements were also higher. Since the Transmigration Group could not yet manufacture large electromagnets, magnetic separation was completely out of the question. The ore dressing plant could only be based on the technologically simple hydraulic jigging method. This process had lower technical requirements for the equipment.

For ease of smelting, iron ore had to undergo a certain amount of screening before being transported to the steel plant. The purpose of screening was to improve the efficiency of smelting, increase the iron output ratio, and improve the efficiency of coal use. Iron ore with an iron content of more than 65% could be directly fed into an open-hearth furnace for steelmaking. Ore with an iron content of more than 45% was used for blast furnace ironmaking. Ore with an iron content of less than 45% had to be screened, crushed, and sintered to increase its iron content to above 45% before it could be used for ironmaking. Ore with an iron content of less than 25% was considered poor ore and was generally discarded. A characteristic of Chinese iron ore is that there is a lot of poor ore, so steel companies generally have to import iron ore. And the imported iron ore is basically concentrate powder that has been processed by an ore dressing plant.

The ore from Tiandu and Shilu was rich ore, so the requirement to increase the iron content by screening was not high. The ore dressing plant was mainly based on ore crushing and grading. Both open-hearth furnaces and blast furnaces required the iron ore to be crushed to a certain particle size for full utilization. The ore particles had to be fine and of uniform size to increase the output of steel.

Sanya’s ore dressing plant was located in Tiandu Town, where the Tiandu Mining Bureau was located, for convenient use of the water from the Tiandu River reservoir. The jigging method required a large amount of water: about 3,000-4,000 liters of water were needed to process 1 ton of ore, making it a major water consumer. Therefore, the ore dressing plant was also equipped with a water circulation and recycling system, including drainage channels, a three-stage settling pond, a filter pond, and pumping equipment. Ore dressing mainly utilizes the buoyancy of water, and the requirements for water quality itself are not high, so simply treated recycled wastewater can be used.

After the ore was transported to the ore dressing plant by railcar, it was first crushed. The crushing was done in three stages: coarse crushing, medium crushing, and fine crushing. The final result was to crush the iron ore into 5-10mm particles. The ore was first poured into a cylindrical crusher. The principle of the crusher was very simple: a large cylinder with many cast iron bars installed inside. The cylinder rotated at high speed driven by a belt, crushing the iron ore inside. The crushing bars inside the crusher had different sizes and could be replaced to adjust the crushing size. However, for the sake of continuous production, the ore dressing plant used a dedicated crusher for each process to save the time consumed by replacing the crushing bars.

After each crushing, the ore was poured into a vibrating screen. Through vibration screening, the crushed ore particles were separated. The ore that met the standards for the next process was poured into the second crusher, while the ore that could not pass through the screen holes was returned to the coarse crusher for further processing.

After three crushings, the ore was poured into a spiral separator for dressing. The spiral separator was very efficient in processing ore, with a metal ore recovery rate of up to 96%—and the labor intensity was very low. The shape of the spiral separator was similar to a spiral slide in a park. Its principle was: under the action of water, the ore flows down along the spiral line due to gravity. Due to friction and centrifugal force, the lighter waste rock particles move along the outer edge of the spiral groove, while the heavier ore moves down along the inner line. At a certain position, the ore particles are discharged by a cutter installed on the inner edge of the spiral groove.

After passing through the spiral separator, the result is middlings. The middlings are then processed by a hydraulic screen and then by a shaking table, and the final product is concentrate. As for the middlings, they can be repeatedly processed by jigging.

The entire ore dressing plant was equipped with jigs, vibrating screens, spiral separators, crushers, hydraulic screens, and water shaking tables. In addition, a 20-cubic-meter ore sintering furnace was planned to be built for sintering ore powder. After testing, the entire ore dressing plant could process 30 tons of ore per hour. Since the equipment was relatively simple, as long as a sufficient water source could be guaranteed, it would be easy to expand the processing capacity.

The waves of the Maniao Peninsula lapped against the shore reefs. A few medium and small motorboats were moored in a small bay, rising and falling with the waves. The land here was barren, with wild grass and exposed red soil everywhere. The few trees swayed in the sea breeze. There were no rice paddies, common on both sides of the Wenlan River, on the Maniao Peninsula. Large tracts of undeveloped wasteland were dotted with a few dry fields. In the old world, this place was the so-called “Jinpai Port Economic Development Zone,” a provincial-level economic development zone in Hainan. However, in the old world, despite its auspicious name, the Jinpai Development Zone had a difficult time. A series of large projects, such as the roll-on/roll-off wharf project in 1989 and the 6 million tons/year oil refinery project in 1993, failed to materialize here. By the early 21st century, it was still just a reserve land for industrial use.

In this era, the Planning Institute designated this place as the future heavy industrial zone of Lin’gao. Since the Hongpai Development Zone had been stumbling along in the old world, the Planning Institute finally named this place the “Maniao Industrial Zone.”

Previously, for security reasons, the Transmigration Group’s steel and heavy chemical enterprises were generally located in the Wenlan River estuary area and outside Bairen City. This was limited by the available land area—most of the land along the river was paddy fields that had been developed for many years, which was a waste for industrial use, and the foundation treatment of paddy fields was also very troublesome. The development potential was limited, and there were increasingly serious problems of water and air pollution. In its planning, the Planning Institute gradually transferred the large-scale production bases of the steel and chemical industries to the development zone on the Maniao Peninsula.

After the Battle of Chengmai, the Senate’s power expanded to the entire Hainan Island. The Maniao Peninsula, which was originally close to the front line, became the core area of the Lin’gao regime’s rule. The Maniao Commune was “time-tested”; the control of the Qiongzhou Strait was in the hands of the navy, and the Fubo Army’s land base was located in the Maniao Commune. The newly built steel and heavy chemical industrial zones had a reliable guarantee of safety.

The Maniao Peninsula is surrounded by the sea on three sides, with Hongpai Port to the east and the Qiongzhou Strait to the north. It is 65 kilometers from the Haikou garrison and 12 kilometers from Lin’gao County. The development zone planned by the General Construction Corporation consists of two clusters, east and west, with a planned area of 20.5 square kilometers. The land here is open and flat, mostly dry land, with only a small amount of paddy fields. The infrastructure conditions are good. The entire local permanent population consists of only nearly one thousand salt field workers and their families from the Maniao Commune, with no large residential areas that need to be relocated. It is suitable for large-scale industrial development in contiguous areas.

The development zone itself has the natural port of Hongpai Port, with a total coastline of about 16.5 kilometers. There are certain conditions for building a port. The “small crossroad” road construction plan implemented by the Planning Institute in Lin’gao County has been completed. The Bopu-Maniao highway, which was urgently started for war preparations, has been paved by thousands of prisoner laborers working day and night. The transportation link for the construction of the industrial zone has been initially resolved.

According to the plan, the third phase of the expansion of the steel industry should have started in April 1630, but it was in a semi-stalled state due to the impact of the Battle of Chengmai. However, the project resumed as soon as the war ended. Benefiting from the war dividends—the use of a large number of prisoner laborers—the project barely caught up with the schedule. As the Fubo Army began to occupy the entire Hainan Island, and its authority extended, the speed of collecting and transporting many materials also greatly accelerated, especially the large amount of timber needed for construction, which began to be fully supplied.

Ji Wusheng, wearing a dusty, dark work uniform, stood on a small hill made of waste soil, overlooking the construction site of the entire steel complex. The future Maniao Steel Complex would rise on this barren land. This was the temporary construction headquarters: a temporary house converted from a container was on the compacted flat ground at the top of the hill. The blades of the wind turbine and anemometer spun rapidly in the sea breeze.

Below the hillside were temporary sheds for technical workers to live in. The chimney of a boiler was smoking, providing hot water and hot meals for the entire construction site. Drinking water was delivered by a water tanker pulled by an ox cart from the waterworks at the Maniao base a few kilometers away. The water from the Maniao River was purified there and then boiled here before it was safe to drink.

The laborers for the project came from the prisoners of the Second Anti-Encirclement Campaign, as well as “special laborers” captured in the security wars in Danzhou, Chengmai, Wenchang, Qiongshan, and other places. They all lived in the prisoner-of-war camp at the Maniao military base and came to the construction site in companies every day. Another part came from the “dispatched labor” from various communes and directly recruited laborers. Working as a hired laborer for a short period of time to earn remuneration had become an important source of income for the local farmers.

Construction materials transported from various factories were piled up like mountains in the material yard: bundles of steel bars and bamboo reinforcement for pouring concrete; steel and wrought iron profiles; various specifications of construction timber and bamboo; stacks of red bricks and flat tiles; countless bags of cement stored under rainproof sheds; rows of two-wheeled dump carts; and refractory bricks from the bittern factory of the Maniao Saltworks…

Workers were building temporary transport roads and laying temporary freight tracks to transport tons of goods to every construction site. Five or six mobile locomobiles spewed black smoke and white steam, providing power for the cranes, pile drivers, mixers, and other locally produced construction machinery. The chugging of the pile drivers, the creaking of the cranes, and the roar of the mixers blended together.