In the process of producing soda ash from the Northern Soda Plant, the most common by-product is calcium sulfide. In line with the principle that the people of the East Coast should eat and squeeze everything out, it is also necessary to extract the last surplus value of calcium sulfide. To this end, Song Qiang, the director of the plant, decided to set up a new workshop in the soda plant, which is specially used to treat calcium sulfide, a by-product obtained in the production of soda ash.

His idea is very simple, some nearby factories often produce a lot of carbon dioxide exhaust gas in the production process, which used to be directly emitted into the atmosphere, but now the idea is that it can be diverged a little. These gases are often discharged at very high temperatures, and if they are introduced into calcium sulfide through a pipe with high-temperature water vapor, then calcium sulfide will react with them to form water-insoluble calcium carbonate and hydrogen sulfide gas. Hydrogen sulfide gas, on the other hand, can react with oxygen in the air under certain conditions to produce water and elemental sulfur. Of course, this reaction requires certain conditions, and there are certain restrictions on the reaction temperature, water vapor humidity, and air content. However, in general, the reaction conditions are not harsh, and it is not difficult to spend more time doing some tests and tests in the laboratory when the reaction has been successful.

The calcium carbonate produced in this process can be used in the previous process to make alkali, and of course, it can also be used to burn lime. More importantly, the sulfur generated during the reaction is an extremely valuable strategic resource for the East Coast people, and if the sulfur in the previous process (the elemental sulfur burned when generating sulfuric acid) can be recovered through this method, it means that the East Coast people have obtained the technology of sulfur recycling, which can be regarded as saving a lot of money for the country.

We can take this approach a little further. For example, the exhaust gas from coal combustion on the East Coast contains a large amount of sulfur dioxide. If this gas is delivered through a pipeline. At high temperature (more than 600 degrees), it reacts with a certain proportion of calcium sulfide to form calcium sulfate and elemental sulfur that are insoluble in water. As for the conditions of this reaction, the people of the Institute of Chemistry are still testing under laboratory conditions, and they are close to success. If they make further progress in industrial mass production, even if the recycling efficiency is not as high as that of later generations, it will be a great breakthrough. Because it means that the people of the East Coast have been able to recover the elemental sulfur from the sulphurous coal, and no longer need to import sulphur from abroad. The foreigner Kadongan has one less weapon in his neck.

However, these are all things for the future, at least for the time being, the technicians of the chemical institute still need a lot of experiments and verifications before they can design and produce the factory. When the chemical industry in Ping'an County was advancing steadily, the second local factory after the ginning factory for processing seed cotton - Luoqia Leather Goods Factory was officially established in Luoqia Port, which was far away in the Xiling area. Although Shao Shude, the commissioner of the Xiling District of this factory, has made a lot of efforts, in fact, it is more from the vigorous promotion of the new government.

With the changes in the textile market, the new government, which has only been in power for more than a year, is also feeling the pressure, and they are not only opening up new markets in the world, but also trying to find new profit growth points. The members of the Executive Committee thought about it, except for the military industry, shipbuilding and leather. There is no new industry on the East Coast, after all, you can't make a profit by exporting grain. Military industry and shipbuilding although high profit margins. But the problem is that the demand is small and quite unstable, and the overall calculation is far less than the profit generated by textiles.

The leather industry is relatively stable, and the demand in the European market is gradually increasing. Let's take France as an example, and the level of pursuit of fur in France is astonishing – otherwise they wouldn't have gone to Quebec to trade fur. At this time, fur was still a relatively expensive product in France, and the wealthy and wealthy people wore beaver, otter, and seal skins produced in North America, which were of excellent quality and very popular in France. Ordinary people only wear some cheap cow and sheep skins, but this is quite limited. Of course, they can also wear some old leather jackets that the rich sell at a low price – the French are very enthusiastic about new styles, and a new seal fur jacket is often worn for a year or two before being sold cheaply to the newly affluent middle class. However, this is still a small number compared to the huge demand, and France is not a large livestock country like the United Kingdom, and their cattle and sheepskins are not high, but they have a lot of demand - this is the market.

And it just so happens that today's Europe is deep in the quagmire of war, and the warring parties have always had a great demand for ammunition bags, leather boots, gun holsters, water bladders, armed belts, leather armor, leather hats and other equipment, and the people on the east coast have been successively exporting a large number of war leather goods to France, Spain, the Hanseatic League, Russia, Turkey and other countries in the past few years, and have successively made hundreds of thousands of yuan. What the Executive Committee wants to do now is to develop this business, because the area of La Plata, near the east coast, has a very large number of cattle and sheepskins, which are of very good quality and at very low prices. The Easterners could buy a large amount of low-cost from them, and then with the help of cheap soda ash produced on a large scale of industrialization, the cost of tanning hides could be reduced to a low point unimaginable by Europeans, and then coupled with the excellent dyeing skills exclusive to Easterners, Europeans would not want to compete with Easterners in this without trade protection.

With this idea, the members of the Executive Committee immediately put it into action, and they first sent a number of staff to conduct research in various parts of the country (mainly in the south) to make a comprehensive understanding of the current situation of the leather industry in the country. On the whole, the current leather processing (mainly referring to the tanning of animal hides) of the East Coast people is relatively scattered, and most of them are small private workshop-type enterprises, and their competitiveness is not very strong. The only symbol of the government's presence in this industry is a small leather goods factory in Ranch Township, which buys tanned hides from various small workshops or retail households in the country, and then processes and colors them into various leather goods and exports them to various markets.

The development speed of this industry over the years is actually quite limited, far from it, the export volume in 40 years is about 90,000 yuan, and in 41 years it barely increased to 115,000 yuan, and then in 42 years, it fell back to 110,000 yuan, and last year, the export volume increased slightly, reaching more than 130,000 yuan. This kind of export growth is simply not the same as the cotton cloth that has a big step a year. There are actually two main reasons for this. First, the soda ash imported from Europe is not cheap - it can even be said to be expensive, which has caused the East Coast people to have a higher cost on ordinary leather goods, and they can not compete with Europeans at all, so they can only rely on dyed leather goods to save some of the situation; Second, leather processing actually requires a lot of manpower, from peeling, cleaning, tanning to processing and production, each step requires a considerable amount of manpower, which is unrealistic for the manpower shortage of the East Coast, so this supposed promising industry has been so tepid for so many years.

However, it is clear that the situation has improved. First of all, the successful operation of the northern soda plant has made the soda ash of the people on the east coast suddenly surplus, and they no longer need to import low-purity and very expensive trona from Europe, which makes their costs drop by a large amount. Another is that after careful research by the staff, everyone believes that many processes in the process of leather tanning and processing can actually be mechanized, provided that they design such a production line.

And this is actually not difficult, although there is no ready-made equipment and production line reference, but we can completely simulate the various processes in the manual production process, slowly design the production line and equipment, and then slowly improve, and constantly improve efficiency and reliability, so that one day it will gradually be perfected. Coupled with the fact that the number of immigrants from the Ming Dynasty increased every year, the shortage of labor may be slightly alleviated, and the factories can also hire a large number of seasonal workers during the off-season, and suddenly produce a batch of finished products to be stored, and then wait for the ships to be shipped out of the port.

In this way, after some arguments, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Government Council moved all the leather processing factories located in Ranch Township to Luoqia Port (Ranch Township only retains livestock breeding base and military horse farm), and at the same time recruited many new workers, expanded the scale of production, and prepared to start the leather processing industry gradually. At the same time, they also strongly integrated the relatively scattered and scattered animal skin tanning workshops in China, and absorbed these workshop owners and senior craftsmen into the newly established tanning guild. Then organize them to begin to formulate various standards in the industry, such as product quality standards, etc., in order to guide the healthy and benign development of the entire industry, so as to compete with leather products in European countries.

As for the source of the hides, this small part is provided domestically, and most of it is probably still on the side of La Plata. The cattle and sheep herds in La Plata are extremely large, and cowhides are often sold for less than three dollars to Spain, Chile, Chalcas, Peru and other places, but how much consumer demand can be in these markets? As a result, there has been a huge backlog of cowhides in La Plata, which has left the cattle owners very worried. But this is definitely good news for the East Coasters, because it means that they have a lot of cheap raw materials to buy, and it can also tie up the native white elite families of La Plata with the East Coasters, which is definitely a good thing.

Now that all the conditions are in place, under the promotion of the new government on the east coast, which is eager to make some achievements, the tanning industry has begun to be included in the national key planning industries, and gradually began large-scale production. (To be continued......)