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 farm and ranch production bases in Australia.

But soon there were strategic concerns among the members of Congress in the Empire State Building.

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

As soon as this question was raised, it immediately attracted the attention of the top echelons of the empire.

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

This question sounded the alarm bell for Zhang Meng, who had been calculating to use asymmetrical breaking to fight Japan, but he never thought that the Japanese might use the same way to oppose the Tang Empire to break the 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 strategic materials such as industrial metals such as steel, cement, oil, grain, and medicines, strategic materials such as various industrial metals and oil will be rapidly consumed due to the outbreak of war, and if they are blockaded by the enemy for a long time, there will inevitably be a shortage.

In Zhang Meng's view, although the Tang Empire had exceeded the maximum combat radius of the Japanese Navy in the Pacific War, it was theoretically impossible to be completely blockaded by the Japanese Navy. However, consider that the wheel of history will change because of the butterfly effect. Once the Tang Empire has the economic and military liliang that can directly compete with Japan, it cannot be ruled out that the Japanese Navy will expand its combat radius and even direct its troops at the Tang Empire.

Thinking of this, Zhang Meng suddenly frowned.

How to solve this very likely problem, Zhang Meng was bored for several days before he thought of a solution.

The Tang Empire was located low in the Pacific Ocean, and there were no mineral resources of industrial value on land at all. However, the neighboring Fiji and New Zealand have mineral resources and oil, and Zhang Meng wants to annex these resource-rich neighboring countries, but he does not yet have the strength to compete with Britain head-on, so he has to wait.

Most of New Zealand's oil is stored on the seabed less than 500 meters deep in the surrounding area, and Zhang Meng knows that several large oil fields in the future have not yet been discovered, so Zhang Meng Jihua formed an offshore oil exploration company to extract oil in several oil storage areas on the Pacific seabed east of New Zealand. Because New Zealand is close to the Tang Empire, and its oil extraction area is also close to the territorial waters of the Tang Empire, it is in line with the principle of strategic petroleum reserves, and it is less likely to be cut off by the Japanese naval blockade than importing oil from Indonesia.

Datang No. 4 Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. was responsible for the exploitation, transportation, and petrochemical construction in the petroleum field, and Zhang Meng immediately ordered the relevant person in charge to set up an offshore oil company, which on the one hand bought the development rights of several oil storage areas on the seabed of the eastern Pacific Ocean from the Governor-General's Office of New Zealand, and on the other hand, quickly purchased a large number of offshore drilling platform facilities from the United States.

In 1930, the former Jihua of the American Rock Oil Company in California began to build offshore oil rigs in the California coastal oil region and the Gulf of Mexico in order to break the monopoly of Rockefeller and other oil giants on the American oil market. But unfortunately, the outbreak of the U.S. economic crisis in 1929 affected the entire U.S. oil market 30 years later, oil prices plummeted like an avalanche, and the offshore drilling and production project of Brooke Company was no longer profitable, so it was forced to suspend Jihua, until 1936, when the U.S. oil market was revived by the Spanish Civil War and large-scale oil reserves in Germany and Japan.

Zhang Meng seized the opportunity and immediately sent someone to negotiate with Pollock Petroleum Company, and wholly acquired all the properties and Jishu patents of Brolock's offshore oil exploitation platform at a price of 12 million US dollars, and assigned it to the offshore oil company under the management of Datang Fourth Heavy Industry.

Datang No. 4 Heavy Industry immediately put the jack-up offshore drilling platform it bought from Brookk into oil drilling in the eastern waters of New Zealand, and completed the first 1,430-meter-deep well two months later, producing the first barrel of crude oil.

Zhang Meng immediately ordered the blockade of the news, the closure of the oil wells, and the use of them as the Tang Empire's strategic oil reserves, once the war against Japan was blocked by the Japanese navy oil channel, then the submarine oil wells sealed in New Zealand would be immediately restarted.

One oil well was naturally not enough, and Datang No. 4 Heavy Industry immediately imported more than 100 sets of drilling platform equipment from related companies in the United States according to the patented jack-up offshore drilling platform purchased from Brooke, of which 60 sets were directly used for drilling operations in the submarine oil area east of New Zealand, and the other 40 sets of equipment were kept as backups.

The oil reserves in the oil fields of the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand contain about 30 million tons of oil, which is not abundant, but it is enough for the Tang Empire itself to consume for 10 years under the condition of being blockaded by war.

Of course, Zhang Meng can't be completely dependent on the undersea oil in New Zealand. Taking advantage of the collapse in international oil prices, Zhang Meng ordered Datang No. 4 Heavy Industry to step up the purchase of crude oil from the international market and mothballed it as a national strategic oil reserve.

At the same time, a large-scale petroleum smelting and chemical plant will be built on three uninhabited islands with an area of about 14~20 square kilometers in the local area, and the scale standard of the three factories is the same, and the daily output of various grades of refined crude oil can reach 800,000 tons. Only one of the refineries was responsible for the daily consumption of various refined oil products in the Tang Empire, and the other two refineries were directly sealed and hidden after completion, and were only opened during the war, or when the first refinery could not meet the refined oil consumption of the Tang Empire.

At the same time as the oil problem was solved, Zhang Meng was also inspired by the submarine oil exploitation project, all kinds of 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, but the surrounding was the vast Pacific Ocean, and there were far more abundant resources than the land under the ocean.

It is well known that the ocean covers about 71% of the Earth's surface area and contains abundant treasures at the bottom of the sea, 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. In addition, the ore grade of the seabed is higher than that of the land, and the manganese content of manganese nodules is more than 40%, and it also contains rare heavy metals such as nickel and chromium. Cobalt crusts contain 1% cobalt and titanium, which is more than 50 times higher than that of land-based mines. Polymetallic sulphide ores are rich in copper and precious metals such as gold and silver.

It is important to know that some manganese nodules contain up to 50% manganese and 27% iron. Some manganese nodules contain as much as 98% manganese dioxide, and 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, and since then, the United States, Germany, France, Japan and other countries have also carried out the exploration and collection of manganese nodules on the seabed.

However, before the Second Shijie War, people were not very interested in these things in the deep sea, first, they did not feel the lack of manganese and iron on land, and second, it was quite troublesome to go to the bottom of the sea to fish for these things, and they felt that it was not cost-effective.

However, by the time of the Second Shijie War, more and more manganese steel was produced on Shijie, and such metals as manganese (as well as copper, nickel, cobalt, etc.) became increasingly scarce. The precious metals required by various industries have surged, and although the reserves of rare precious metals on land are huge, the grade is low, the cost of large-scale mining is getting higher and higher, and the speed cannot keep up with the consumption of the war, which delays the time for many new equipment to be put into service in batches.

It was not until after the war that countries realized the importance of seabed manganese nodules and cobalt crusts to national industries, especially the modern defense industry, especially the United States and the Soviet Union after the war.

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