To be able to allow so many high-level personnel of Haihan to gather together for a meeting on the night of the National Day, the matter discussed was naturally insignificant, and on the cover of a stack of hand-copied materials on the table in front of the participants, the word "top secret" was written on Xingmu.

"It is true that our current industrialization process is far ahead of this era, but for those of us, the current pace of development is still too slow, and there is still a considerable gap between us and the industrial society we want to build, especially in terms of production efficiency, and the machinery and equipment we can use now are still limited by the small installed hydropower stations built six or seven years ago, and the primitive steam power." We have long had the technology to manufacture internal combustion engines, but due to fuel supply, we cannot put them into practical applications. However, this shortcoming will not limit our development for too long, because the next project we will implement is to solve the problem of fuel supply for internal combustion engines. What it means for us to take this step is something that everyone here understands. ”

In the original history, it was not until the end of the next century, in 1794, that the Englishman Streeter proposed the concept of mixing air with fuel to obtain power from fuel combustion. By 1833, the Englishman Wright proposed the design of directly using the combustion pressure to push the piston to do work. Various schemes of internal combustion engines followed, but it was not until 1860 that the Frenchman Lenoir imitated the structure of the steam engine to create the first practical gas engine, but the thermal efficiency of this thing was only about 4%. In 1876, the German inventor Otto built the first four-stroke internal combustion engine, which was the only internal combustion engine that could be mass-produced and put into practical use.

The invention of the internal combustion engine has far greater significance for the improvement of social productivity and scientific and technological development than the steam engine, but this more advanced power equipment has much higher fuel requirements than the steam engine. Although it is possible to make an internal combustion engine from gas, it is clear that gas is not the best solution for transportation and storage, as future generations of travelers know. In order to put the internal combustion engine into practical use, it is necessary to solve the fuel problem first - first it is necessary to extract oil and refine refined oil to ensure the fuel supply of the internal combustion engine.

Although the traversers have dragon slaying skills, they are limited by the objective environment on this issue. In the land area controlled by the first few years of the traversal, there are no known oil fields that can be exploited. For example, 120 kilometers southeast of Vung Tau Port in southern Annam, the Baihu oil field with the largest proven reserves in Vietnam is located. However, the traversers will certainly not be able to realize the production technology and large-scale equipment needed to exploit the submarine oil fields before entering the coffin, so even if they know that there is oil on the seabed, they can only look at the sea and sigh.

However, the Ministry of Industry, which has always been obsessed with the internal combustion engine, is not at all helpless about it, thanks to the all-encompassing database, the travelers have long confirmed the existence of underground oil fields on the island of Taiwan. Since then, the Ministry of Industry has been determined to advance the history of industrial oil well exploitation from a small town in Pennsylvania in 1859 to the island of Taiwan two centuries ago.

In the original history, in the last years of Xianfeng in the Qing Dynasty, the people of the sulfur pit in Miaoli County, Taiwan discovered that there was local oil gushing out of the ground. The locals dug a well more than one zhang deep by manpower, and they could harvest seventy or eighty catties of crude oil gushing out of the ground every day. However, at that time, the real internal combustion engine had not yet been invented, and the locals only used it for lighting. In the third year of Guangxu, Shen Baozhen, the governor of Liangjiang, inspected Taiwan, and after hearing about this, he took the oil field into a government office, and hired American technicians to mine it with machines, and once increased the oil production to 1,500 catties per day. In the thirteenth year of Guangxu, Liu Mingchuan, the governor of Taiwan, set up a mining and oil bureau and drilled five wells, with a maximum depth of 120 meters, but later because the output was too low to make ends meet, it closed down after a few years of operation.

However, there are more than one oil and gas field on Taiwan Island that has been discovered and exploited in later generations, and there are considerable reserves of oil and gas fields in Jinshui and Tieyi Mountain in Miaoli County, Qingcao Lake and Qiding in Hsinchu, but the technical difficulty of their exploitation is different, and it is not as close to the surface as the oil fields in Miaoli out of the sulfur pit. The oil field out of the pit is said to have had a steady output until the crossing operation, and considering its geographical location is the closest oil producing area to Sanya, and Haihan is relatively difficult to control the area, it has become the preferred mining target recognized by the Ministry of Industry.

Haihan only officially set foot on the island in October of the previous year, and basically completed control of the western coastline of the island in the first half of last year, and the Ministry of Industry began to formally carry out the preparatory work for the oil project only last year.

The relevant preparatory work is mainly divided into three parts, one is the production of drilling equipment, the drill bit is the finished product brought over when crossing, only the production of drill pipe and drilling rig is required. Although Haihan's steel production capacity is still very limited, it is not difficult to squeeze out a part of it to produce drill pipes, and drilling rigs and beam pumping units can only use steam power, and the production technology in this area is basically mature, and only needs to make some adjustments according to the needs of oil extraction. Although the production efficiency is certainly not as good as the professional equipment of later generations, as long as the local method is launched, it can be used, and the problem of whether there is a problem must be solved first, and then the matter of upgrading the equipment will be slowly considered.

The second part is the construction of oil refining facilities, and the extracted oil must be refined to obtain the refined oil used in the internal combustion engine. Although due to the limitation of productivity conditions in this era, there is no way to build a large-scale oil refinery, but with the current industrial level of Haihan, it is not too difficult to build a tube furnace and a vertical kettle, and use the kettle distillation soil method to refine oil, but the processing capacity is limited, and the quality of the refined fuel oil cannot reach as high as that of later generations.

Although it is also a local oil refining, the Ministry of Industry is prepared to invest resources in oil projects that are not comparable to those of later private workshops, and has also formulated a series of technical improvement plans for this purpose. For example, the design of a more efficient furnace structure and heating system, the construction of catalytic towers and the increase of kettle temperature, the configuration of fractionation columns, the use of continuous feeding and rapid slag removal to improve production efficiency, and so on. Although these technical improvements will greatly increase the initial investment and increase the workload in the production and commissioning stage, the Ministry of Industry believes that these are the price worth paying, and the sooner and earlier ushered in the era of internal combustion engines, so that Haihan Kingdom can lead this era with a greater advantage.

The third part is the organization and training of production personnel, which is divided into two parts: drilling and refining. In recent years, the drilling team organized by the Ministry of Industry has drilled a lot of artesian wells on Hainan Island, which is in disguise through actual combat training, and has mastered the basic drilling technology relatively proficiently. It's just that there are no corresponding facilities for oil refining, and it is difficult to train skilled industrial workers purely on paper, which can only be trained while producing after the implementation of the project in Taiwan.

These preparations are not difficult to say, but they are not simple, and they require the coordination and cooperation of many departments mainly from the Ministry of Industry, and it depends on the budget and staffing that the Executive Committee can finally approve. So far, the executive committee has given the green light to this, basically what the project preparation team wants, the initial drilling equipment is basically in place, and the local situation on the island of Taiwan tends to be stable, everything is now ready, just waiting for the start of construction. After the celebration has passed in the past few days, the first batch of engineers composed of the exploration team of the Ministry of Industry and the construction team of the Ministry of Construction will go to Taiwan to carry out the initial oilfield exploration work.

"Now that the personnel and production equipment are in place, the drilling plan and the local site infrastructure are planned, the next step is to arrange transportation and safety protection. After introducing the preparation of the project, he handed over the voice to those behind him.

"Then I'll move on. Sun Changmi, the former Minister of Maritime Transport and now Vice Minister of Communications, took the initiative to take over the conversation. He and Yue Zhiyun were not idle this night, and attended two meetings led by the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Industry, which can be regarded as one of the busiest departments.

"We have mobilized 22 ships for the relevant materials and personnel in Sanya Port, and strive to complete the delivery work in one go. Sun Changmi introduced: "There will also be some daily necessities that will be supplied in Guangdong, and they will be shipped directly from Hong Kong. The required ordinary workers will be selected from the nearest migrant camp in Penghu, which can also save some long-distance capacity. In addition, because the military was accompanying this time, the route chosen was based on the opinion of the military. ”

"This time, the military will send four exploratory-class warships, two supply ships and one troop carrier to Taiwan with the fleet of the Ministry of Shipping, and when they arrive, they will build a dock and be stationed in the area. Considering that the area is still under the control of the local indigenous tribes, we have two companies of land forces to protect the safety of the site and construction personnel. In addition, I will be stationed there for a period of time, serving as the head of both the military and medical departments. "The next to speak is the military representative Morgan, this time the Ministry of Defense also handed over a task to him, although it is not a local officer, but at least it is much more powerful than the medical school in Sanya with apprenticeship.

"Minister He, can you also say a few words?" Tao Donglai said to He Xi after Morgan finished speaking.

The Ministry of Security is also one of the few departments that need to participate in the two meetings tonight, and He Xi and Hao Wanqing are each responsible for attending. After hearing Tao Donglai's proposal, He Xi nodded and responded: "Then let me say a few words, the Miaoli project is a key industrial project supervised by the Executive Committee this year, and everyone is very clear about the significance of China's future development, so the confidentiality level of this project is also Class A." The Ministry of Security will have personnel stationed on the ground to cooperate with the military to maintain intelligence security. ”

As for how many people will be sent over and with what kind of disguise they will go, He Xi didn't say anything more. Although all of you are here as trespassers, the Ministry of Security is only responsible to the Executive Committee, and these specific work arrangements do not need to be reported in detail to other departments. Moreover, in the future, Miaoli, an oil exploitation area, will definitely be a military area, and the role of the Ministry of Security in the local area is actually relatively limited, and it will basically play a surveillance function.

The last to speak was Liu Shanxia, the new minister of construction, who was the latest to learn about the project, but this was also because the ministry could play a limited role in the project, which was mainly responsible for building infrastructure projects and living facilities for local production personnel and the military. If it weren't for political considerations, there would be no need for him, the number one leader of the Ministry of Construction, to personally supervise the work, and at least the foremen of several construction teams under him would be competent. It is precisely because of this that Liu Shanxia's statement is really just a statement, and there is not much substantive thing that needs to be emphasized at this kind of meeting.

These two conferences, held on the night of April 1, 1634, basically established the military and industrial goals of Haihan for the coming period. The two decisions of marching into the northern coast of the Ming Dynasty and exploiting oil will have a far-reaching impact on the Haihan Dynasty, and the historical records of later generations have also made various descriptions and speculations about these two meetings.

There are two main doubts that have aroused the most speculation from the outside world, one is why Haihan took the initiative to choose to go north when the situation in the South China Sea is very good, and whether it is because the leaders of the Executive Committee at that time had judged that the situation in Daming was about to deteriorate, so they seized this opportunity to take the initiative to intervene. The second is why Haihan did not have personnel stationed in Miaoli, Taiwan at that time, so why did he suddenly send a whole engineering team to the local exploration and successfully found the oil field, and used it as fuel to drive the advent of the internal combustion engine.

However, like many other unsolved mysteries in the history of the Haihan Dynasty, there is no universally accepted and reasonable solution to these two doubts, and the vast majority of historians can only understand them as the predictive talent that only the first Haihan patriarchs possessed. This talent for not being able to confirm its authenticity allowed the Haihan Kingdom to develop at an unimaginable pace in the early decades of its founding, leaving its contemporaries far behind.

However, at this time, the time-travelers did not have time to consider the eyes and questions of future generations, and they just wanted to end the meeting early and return home to have a good rest. For the heads of these departments, although it is true that they enjoy superior power in their daily work and life, the degree of hard work in their work is indeed not comparable to that of ordinary people. This founding celebration was both a great honor and a very hard time for these travelers who held high-level management positions in the Haihan Kingdom, and many of them would go on a mission after the celebration, and every minute of reunion with their families before that was even more precious.