Chapter 136: Rising to the Top
Since the founding of the country in 1893, most of the energy consumed by the country has come from coal, but by 1897, after the Republic of Seris began to set off domestic electrification**, the various industries in the country have begun to adjust their energy structure. In addition to some of the major coal-fired power plants, which still come from coal-based raw materials, the domestic oil energy power plants and local hydropower stations have also begun to emerge in the country's energy landscape.
According to the relevant statistics of the Ministry of Industry of Seris, by the end of December 1899, the annual power generation of Seris had reached 8,927,600 megawatt hours in history, and its world ranking surpassed that of France in Europe, and its own electrification scale was only the United States, Britain and Germany among the major powers.
And from the point of view of the data itself, in addition to the 22.79 million megawatts of Ceris and the United States, it is still very different from the United States, and it needs to catch up for a long time, and the annual power generation of the rest of Britain and Germany is also very close to their own data, of which the annual power generation of the United Kingdom in 1899 was 9.9136 million megawatts, and Germany is only less than two percentage points more than Ceris, only one step ahead of the data of 9.4005 million megawatts. It can be said that with the rapid momentum of Seris's current electrification development, it is only a matter of time before it surpasses the UK and Germany in terms of data.
In fact, since the end of the last century, countries have entered the secondary industry** (electrification**), and the industrial community of East Asia Seris can be called staggering in various data. In addition to surpassing Russia, France, Italy and other countries in terms of steel and coal production, its own economic development data has grown at a rapid rate of more than 20 per year in the past few years.
Among them, oil, which is known as the blood of industry, plays a vital role. In addition to its growing weight in the country's energy and power generation industry, oil also plays an irreplaceable role in many new industries in Seris, such as automobiles, shipping, aviation and various chemical industries.
By July 1900, the country had consumed more than 18.8 million barrels of oil (42 gallons per barrel in SIUs). Thanks to the expansion of the automobile industry, which had just "improved" at the beginning of the new century, the world's oil industry as a whole developed about 5 to 10 years ahead of the other time and space. Looking at Seris alone, excluding the previous years, the oil consumption figures for the months of the year alone have reached 9.22 million barrels, equivalent to more than 145,000 tons.
Although this data still seems to be very inconspicuous compared to the coal consumption of more than 100 million in Seris during this period, it should be noted that this data has exceeded the total domestic oil consumption of Seris in previous years. The data itself is nothing, but what is striking is the seemingly irrepressible trend of multiplying on an annual basis.
In this disproportionate, while all walks of life in the country attach importance to the benefits of oil, Seris himself has inadvertently taken on the hat of an oil-poor country. In fact, before Seris seized the colony of Borneo in the direction of the South Seas, Seris's domestic industrial crude oil needs have always come from American oil companies on the other side of the ocean, although Chen Zeyu's Avalanche Group's branch in the Americas has also been hoarding a large number of oil fields, but before these places have been "exposed", it has to be said that Seris's industry still has to bear the "exploitation" of many American oil suppliers.
In fact, it is not only Seris that has this problem, in the original time and space, until the 30s of the 20th century, 63 barrels of every 100 barrels of oil produced in the world came from the Standard Oil Company of the United States. Since Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870, the U.S. oil industry has monopolized most of the world's oil supply before the discovery of oil in Southeast Asia and Central America.
Fortunately, it was also in this era, in the dawn of the oil industry, when the world's annual oil production was less than coal consumption1, the vast majority of the world's industrial powers were still fixing their eyes on various coal and iron resource areas, and even the Americans, who had a de facto monopoly on the world's oil supply, did not attach too much importance to their own "superior" position.
In this time and space, before Seris took the lead in the expansion of the world's internal combustion engine industry, oil was only used by people around the world as a raw material for refining kerosene and used as a household lighting. It can be said that before the 20th century, it was not so much the oil industry as the lamp oil industry, in addition, oil could also provide some lubricant products to the industry, in fact, before the 20th century, except for Chen Zeyu, there may not be any national leader who would be so unusually concerned about his country's oil industry.
As far as Chen Zeyu himself is concerned, he is a modern person who naturally knows the extremely important position of petroleum in the future chemical and energy industry.
Under his arrangement, the emerging East Asian capitalist state has successively seized far more territory and resources than the later republics. It can be said that after all these years of hard work, Seris now has all the necessary resources for modern industrial production, but it lacks only oil. Some may argue that China was the world's fourth-largest oil producer in the past, but one must also admit that the East Asian country is a real net importer of oil despite its abundant oil reserves. Chen Zeyu served in the National Reserve Bureau of the Republic for a period of time in his previous life, but he knew how huge the annual oil shortage of the Republic was at that time, so that in many international affairs, the political axe of the Republic at that time had to look at the face of the Americans.
In fact, as far as the Americans were concerned, they had never regarded China as a real adversary, and in their eyes, they had always had only one opponent, and that was the Russians who straddled the Eurasian continent. There is also only one reason, that is, because the other country's country has never lacked resources, yes! Whether it's coal, iron, oil, or any other industrial resource necessary for the rise of a nation, polar bears have never been lacking. In contrast, although China's national GDP at that time had occupied the second place in the world in history, and the country's industrial capacity surpassed that of the United States and became the world's first, what was the case? Most of the resources needed by the country - iron ore for steel mills, oil for petrochemical refining industry - had to be imported from abroad! At that time, all the major sea lanes in the world were firmly in the hands of the Americans, and when the naval ships of the other country were cruising in the world's oceans at all times, not only China, but also no country's political axe could go against the will of the Americans at that time......
In order to change this situation of being controlled by others, under the orders of Chen Zeyu, the Republic of Seris launched a war against the Dutch East Indian colonial authorities in July last year. While adding to the glory of the "international event" of the late 19th century, it has to be said that it must be acknowledged as a basic fact that Borneo's oil resources played a crucial role in determining the starting point of the war.
In addition to this treasure trove of oil in the South Seas, after 1900, the Northwest Yumen Petroleum in Celis also entered the development horizon of the domestic industry...... With the successive exploitation of these oil fields, by the beginning of the new century, Seris threw off its own oil-poor country in one fell swoop and became the world's oil-rich country.