The resource-rich Australia has always been regarded by Zhang Meng as the rear energy base of the Tang Empire, which can be seen from his large-scale construction of agricultural and ranch production bases in Australia.

But soon some of the members of the MPs at the Empire State Building raised strategic concerns.

Since our number one enemy is the Japanese, once the war begins with Japan and the powerful Japanese navy cuts off the maritime connection between the Tang Empire and Australia, the energy base behind the Tang Empire will be useless.

Once this issue was raised, it immediately attracted the attention of the senior officials of the empire.

For this reason, Zhang Xinhai, who was determined to start a war against Japan, immediately called him over, asking him to deal with this difficult strategic issue in person.

This question sounded the alarm for Zhang Meng. He had been planning to use asymmetrical breaking of war to fight against Japan, but he never thought that the Japanese might use the same method to oppose the Tang Empire to carry out breaking war.

Although Zhang Meng secretly built a large number of strategic material reserve warehouses on some uninhabited islands of the Tang Empire, and stored a considerable scale of industrial metals, cement, oil, food, medicine and other strategic materials, various industrial metals and oil, strategic materials such as war will be consumed sharply due to the outbreak of war. If they are blocked by the enemy for a long time, they will inevitably be scarce.

In Zhang Meng's view, although the Tang Empire has exceeded the maximum combat radius of the Japanese Navy in the Pacific War, it is theoretically impossible to be completely blocked by the Japanese Navy. However, considering that the wheels of history will change due to the butterfly effect, once the Tang Empire has the economic and military power that can directly compete with Japan, it is not ruled out that the Japanese Navy will expand its combat radius and even point the front of the Tang Empire directly.

When Zhang Meng thought of this, he frowned.

How to solve this problem that is most likely to occur made Zhang Meng feel bored for several days before he thought of a solution.

On the low Pacific Ocean of the Tang Empire, there was no mineral resource with industrial value on land. However, in the neighboring Fiji and New Zealand had mineral resources and oil. Zhang Meng wanted to annex these neighboring countries with rich resources, but he did not have the strength to compete with Britain head-on, so he had to wait.

Most of New Zealand's oil is stored on the seabed less than 500 meters deep in the surrounding area. Zhang Meng knew that several large oil fields have not been discovered in the future. Therefore, Zhang Meng planned to form a marine oil mining company to exploit oil in several oil storage sea areas on the Pacific seabed east of New Zealand. Since New Zealand is very close to the Tang Empire, its oil mining area is also close to the territorial waters of the Tang Empire, so it is in line with the principle of strategic oil reserves. Compared with imported oil from Indonesia, the possibility of being blocked and cut off by the Japanese Navy is lower.

Datang Fourth Heavy Industry is responsible for the oil field mining, transportation and petrochemical construction. Zhang Meng immediately ordered the relevant person in charge to form a marine oil company. On the one hand, he bought the development rights of several oil storage areas on the eastern Pacific seabed from the Governor's Office of New Zealand, and on the other hand, he quickly purchased a large number of offshore drilling platform facilities from the United States.

The American Borock Oil Company, located in California, originally planned to establish offshore oil drilling platforms in the California coastal oil zone and the Gulf of Mexico in 1930 to break the monopoly of oil giants such as Rockefeller on the US oil market. Unfortunately, the US economic crisis broke out in 1929, which affected the entire US oil market 30 years later. Oil prices plummeted like an avalanche. Borock's offshore drilling and oil production project was no longer profitable, so it was forced to suspend its plan. It was not until the US oil market was recovered by the Spanish Civil War and the large-scale reserves of Germany and Japan and other countries that the US oil market recovered.

Zhang Meng seized the opportunity and immediately sent someone to negotiate with Boroke Petroleum Company, and acquired all the industrial and technical patents of Boroke Petroleum Company's offshore oil mining platform for US$12 million, and was assigned to the management of the offshore oil company under Datang No. 4 Heavy Industry.

Datang Fourth Heavy Industry will immediately invest the jack-up offshore drilling platform purchased from Boluoke to oil drilling projects in the eastern waters of New Zealand, and completed the first 1,430-meter-deep oil well two months later and produced the first barrel of crude oil.

Zhang Meng immediately ordered the blockade of news and closed the oil wells and used it as the strategic oil reserve of the Tang Empire. Once the battle against Japan is blocked by the Japanese Navy, the submarine oil wells sealed in New Zealand will be immediately restarted.

One oil well is naturally not enough. Datang Fourth Heavy Industry immediately imported more than 100 sets of drilling equipment from related American companies based on the patented technology of the jack-up offshore drilling platform purchased from Boluoke. Sixty of them were directly used for drilling operations in the submarine oil area east of New Zealand, and the other forty sets were kept as backup.

The oil area on the Pacific Ocean bottom of the east of New Zealand contains about 30 million tons of oil. Although it is not rich, it is enough for the Tang Empire to consume it for 10 years under the war blockade.

Of course, Zhang Meng could not rely entirely on New Zealand's submarine oil. Taking advantage of the plummeting international oil prices, Zhang Meng ordered Datang Fourth Heavy Industry to step up purchasing crude oil from the international market and seal it up for the purpose of the national oil strategic reserve.

At the same time, a large oil smelting and chemical factory was built on three uninhabited islands with an area of ​​about 14 to 20 square kilometers. The scale standards of the three factories are the same. After completion, they can produce 800,000 tons of finished crude oil per day. Only one of the refineries is responsible for the daily consumption of various refined oils in the Tang Empire. The other two refineries are directly sealed and hidden after completion. They will only be opened during the war, or the first refinery cannot meet the consumption of refined oils in the Tang Empire.

While the oil problem was solved, Zhang Meng was also inspired by the submarine oil mining project. All the mineral resources needed for the industrial development of the Tang Empire had to be imported from abroad. Although there were no mineral resources on the local land, the vast Pacific Ocean was around, and under the ocean there were resources much richer than land.

As we all know, the ocean area covers about 71% of the earth's surface area and contains rich treasures on the seabed (especially the deep seabed). Among them, the reserves of manganese nodules are 4 trillion tons, the reserves of cobalt crusts are 2 trillion tons, and the reserves of polymetallic sulfides are 1.5 trillion tons. Moreover, the grade of seabed ores is higher than that of land, and the manganese nodules are more than 40%, and they also contain rare heavy metals such as nickel and chromium. The cobalt crust contains 1% cobalt and titanium, which is more than 50 times higher than that of land ores. Polymetallic sulfide ores are rich in precious metals such as copper, gold and silver.

You should know that some manganese nodules have a manganese content of up to 50% and an iron content of up to 27%. Some manganese nodules have a manganese dioxide content of up to 98%, and they can even be used to produce a battery without any treatment.

As early as 1872, the British Challenger collected manganese nodules in the deep sea. Since then, countries such as the United States, Germany, France, and Japan have also successively explored and collected manganese nodules under the sea.

However, before World War II, people were not very interested in these things in the deep sea. First, they did not feel a lack of manganese and iron on land, and second, they were also quite troublesome to go to Haidi to recover these things and felt that they were not cost-effective.

However, by the Second World War, more and more manganese steel was produced in the world, and metals such as manganese (also copper, nickel, cobalt, etc.) were increasingly lacking. The precious metals needed for various industries surged. Although the reserves of rare precious metals on land were huge, the grade was low, the cost of large-scale mining was getting higher and higher, and the speed could not keep up with the consumption of war, which delayed the time for mass service of many new equipment.
Chapter completed!