Chapter 508 - The Coal-Washing Plant

No one had expected the Nandu River's navigability to be so dismal. The assembled committee members sat in disappointed silence. With water so shallow, what was the point of running boats at all?

Using Ming-era grain-transport vessels to haul coal would require at least some dredging. As for large-scale sea-and-river intermodal shipping, the entire lower reaches would need comprehensive channel improvement. Even if all of Hainan were already under the transmigrated collective's control, with unlimited supplies of materials and manpower, the sheer scale of such a project—and the investment it would demand—would likely warrant its own line item in the Five-Year Plan.

"So let's just work with the small boats," someone concluded.

"Install engines on the transport boats," another suggested. "With higher speed, each boat could make more trips—twelve boats making one extra run means an additional sixty tons of capacity!"

"Fit them with small steam engines. We can manufacture that sort of engine without difficulty now," Jiang Ye said. "We can even use Li Di's small steam engine as a prototype for reverse-engineering."

Installing a steam engine would sacrifice some payload, of course, but the ability to make more runs would increase total throughput—an acceptable trade-off.

"A standard transport boat's payload is five tons. Add a steam engine and the coal to power it, and the payload loss is too great," Wang Luobin objected. "I think we'd be better off building a tugboat. We could make the steam engine more powerful and tow a string of ten or so small barges behind it. The old-style narrow barges used on British canals would fit the bill perfectly—basically an open, oblong box of the simplest possible construction, with very shallow draft."

The upshot of the discussion was to begin building a small steam engine at once, along with a fleet of small barges. Additionally, they would establish a coal-washing plant at the Jiazi Coal Mine.

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

"Tang Menglong's report to the Industry Commission makes clear that lignite accounts for only forty percent, and a portion of that isn't even suitable for coking. Gangue and other low-heat-value coal make up the majority. Rather than ship everything, we should wash it first and transport only the coking-grade lignite. The rest can stay at the Jiazi mine for now—there's no shortage of wasteland in this era."

"Actually, gangue has plenty of uses—at the very least, it can be burned to make cement…"

"Compared to cement, coking is what matters," Luo Duo said. "Besides, once we occupy Qiongshan, we can develop and utilize those materials locally. There's no need to haul it all to Lingao and pollute the environment there."

"Why not just coke the coal on-site at the Jiazi mine? I've seen the Kailuan-style coke ovens at Bopu—simple structures, no technical sophistication."

"Ji Tuisi would kill you," Wang Luobin said. "He worked so hard to procure the coal-chemical integrated production equipment from the twenty-first century—you'd just scrap it? The whole point of that system is comprehensive utilization: directly processing the tar and waste gases from coking to produce all sorts of by-products. If you move the coking operation to the Jiazi mine, what's he supposed to do?"

In the past, the Kailuan-style ovens had been used mainly because the coking-coal supply was unstable, and the integrated system—once fired up—could not be switched on and off at will, so it had never actually entered regular operation. Now that a stable supply channel existed, the high-pollution, high-waste Kailuan ovens had become the first "obsolete technology" slated for decommissioning by the Planning Commission.

Ma Qianzhu readily approved the Industry Commission's Jiazi Coal Mine upgrade proposal, allocating the necessary raw materials and equipment. Establishing a stable coal-supply system was now a top priority.

Xiao Gui and his team, tasked with reproducing the steam engine, first "requisitioned" the American-made small steam engine Li Di kept in the shipyard workshop. Under Li Di's pained gaze, the little engine was disassembled piece by piece, each component labeled and measured in preparation for reverse-engineering.

"American industrial design really is first-rate!" Xiao Gui exclaimed admiringly over the parts strewn across the floor. "Such an ingenious structure."

"Can you replicate it?" Ran Yao asked.

"An exact copy is beyond us—their machining processes and materials are beyond our reach. But our requirements are lower too. We can scale up the component dimensions a bit, and that should get us close enough."

Even as Xiao Gui and Zhou Bili labored to reproduce the steam engine, the Jiazi Coal Mine's coal-washing plant was under construction. Lin Baiguang felt the pressure mounting. In his original conception, the Jiazi mine was to be a modest operation—a few hundred people quietly digging coal, then shipping it by boat to the Hai family dock for loading. He had not expected the scope to balloon like this.

"If we keep expanding, the Jiazi Coal Mine will have 'Australians' written all over it in plain characters," Lin Baiguang grumbled.

The coal-washing plant was located near the Jiazi dock's storage yard, where water for washing was abundant—a necessity, since coal washing consumed five tons of water per ton of coal. Discharging wastewater into the river was also convenient. Coal washing involved no sophisticated technology; the equipment was not complex: crushers, jiggers, dewatering screens, and the like—none difficult to manufacture. The principal washing apparatus was the sluice.

Power for the plant came from steam engines. The Industry Commission shipped a second boiler and two 50-horsepower Mozi Mark II steam engines to the Jiazi Coal Mine. All were installed at the Jiazi dock—one to drive the water pump, the other to power the washing equipment. The boiler burned gangue from the wash process; the plant's designed annual throughput was 250,000 tons of raw coal.

"Since we're equipping the Jiazi dock with steam engines anyway, let's send a steam crane," Ma Qianzhu said. "It'll speed up loading considerably. Otherwise, the boiler's steam would just go to waste."

"We'll also need to add a full set of equipment at the Hai family dock, or one end will be open while the other stays clogged," Zhan Wuya said.

"The Hai family dock isn't a big problem; we can use local indigenous labor in a human-wave approach. Labor's cheap there," Ma Qianzhu said after a moment's thought. "It's not that I begrudge a few pieces of equipment, but that's deep inside Ming-controlled core territory. Running steam engines and boilers would be far too conspicuous."

Soon a steel monster sprouted on the banks of the Nandu River—an iron-armed creature ceaselessly puffing white steam. A pumping station on the riverbank used steam power to draw water and supply the coal-washing plant with vast quantities of it. Behind the crane rose a three-story building fitted with long wooden chutes—the washing plant itself. Raw coal was hoisted by steam-driven winches to a hopper on the third floor, then passed through successive stages of screening, washing, and jigging before emerging from the bottom as clean coal. Gangue and inferior coal were diverted along the way via chutes. Blackened wash water flowed into settling ponds before being discharged into the Nandu; the ponds also recovered large amounts of coal fines. This fine coal had a high moisture content and took a long time to dry. Wang Luobin exploited precisely that high moisture to establish a briquette workshop, using a steam-driven press to manufacture honeycomb coal briquettes.

Though transport constraints still limited deliveries, the steady flow of dark lignite from the Jiazi Coal Mine finally resolved the instability of purchasing coal from Guangdong. At last, Ji Tuisi of the Chemistry Department could confidently commission the coal-chemical integrated production system—built but never actually put into full-time operation—and run it at full capacity for continuous production.

The formal start-up of the coal-chemical integrated system brought a quantum leap to chemical industry development. The simplest change: the primitive sulfuric-acid workshop shut down. High-polluting, erratic-quality sulfuric acid produced by the crude method was replaced by industrially manufactured acid. Other by-products—gasoline, diesel, asphalt, phenol, toluene, crude benzene, various solvent oils, lubricating oils, and paraffin wax—also began coming off the line. Lubricating oil and paraffin wax in particular were a godsend for the machinery industry—the lubricating properties of coconut-oil dregs had always been limited. Paraffin, besides its industrial uses, gave the Light Industry Department an opportunity to manufacture an entirely new consumer product: modern candles. Paraffin-based candles not only cost less than traditional tallow candles but also burned far brighter. The treated cotton-thread wicks consumed themselves as the candle burned, eliminating the need for "snuffing" and the attendant black smoke and bad smell. As for gasoline and diesel—though output was minuscule—they at least offered a glimmer of hope for internal-combustion engines whose fuel reserves were running dry. At least some vehicles would not be reduced to bizarre contraptions topped with coal-gas bags.

"Now we have the firewood for steelmaking; all we need is the rice for cooking," said Ji Wusheng of the Iron and Steel Industry Department at an early-December implementation meeting for the Five-Year Plan. "Phase Three of the steel mill expansion will begin in April 1630."

Phase Two had been fully completed in November 1629, its main focus being the perfection of smelting-facility supporting systems, the installation of rolling-mill equipment, and the increase of converter-steelmaking capacity. Steel production still relied primarily on imported pig iron; the collective had not yet established its own pig-iron industry. Phase Three would add two blast furnaces and two open-hearth furnaces, along with a new iron-ore beneficiation plant. Tiandu ore was of high enough grade to be used directly for steelmaking. The Iron and Steel Industry Department planned to sort the ore: the highest-grade material would go straight into steelmaking, while the next tier would be smelted into pig iron.

The blast furnaces in the design had a capacity of 125 cubic meters, capable of producing 50 tons of pig iron per day—roughly mid-nineteenth-century technology. With both blast furnaces running, annual pig-iron output would reach 35,000 tons. The figure made everyone's eyes light up: 35,000 tons of pig iron! To put that in perspective, during the Industrial Revolution, Britain's pig-iron output in 1720 was only 25,000 tons.

"That's practically a mountain of steel and a sea of iron!" Wang Luobin was elated. With such prodigious pig-iron capacity, steel would no longer be the bottleneck constraining Lingao's industrialization. Railways, iron-hulled ships, large all-steel-frame factory buildings, reinforced-concrete construction, complete sets of industrial equipment—all would be within reach.

With a massive steel supply, the transmigrated collective's industrial production could finally break free from its present small-scale, almost artisanal mode and embark on the road to true heavy industry.

(End of Chapter)