Natural gas is a combustible gas hidden underground. It together with oil and coal constitute the pillar industry of energy in the world today. At present, natural gas has become a strategic resource. my country was the first to discover and use natural gas in the world. According to historical records, it was more than 1,600 years earlier than , Western countries .
The earliest record of natural gas in ancient Chinese books is Ban Gu's "Han Shu·Suju Sayings" in the first year of Emperor Xuan of Han, "the Heavenly Courtyard Huo Well in Hongmen." Hongmen County, , was established in the Han Dynasty, belonging to Xihe County, , and is located in the southwest of Shenmu County at the northern end of today's Shaanxi Province. Tianfengyuan is the name of the military horse farm in the Han Dynasty. Hongmen is close to the Inner Mongolia grassland, so a military horse farm is set up here. Northern Wei Li Daoyuan's "Shui Jing·Heshui Notes" records: "There is Hongmen Pavilion fifty miles west of Yin County (now south of Shenmu County) and the Huojing Temple in Tianfengyuan, and the fire comes out of the earth." This historical material clearly points out the location of the Huojing Temple.
Fire well is the name of the ancients for the combustion phenomenon of natural gas wells. The above records show that the earliest record of natural gas discovery in my country should be in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, but the Hongmen Fire Well was formed naturally and not artificially excavated. Because people had limited awareness at that time, they believed that the fire that jumped out from the ground was a display of gods, so they set up temples to sacrifice.
By the Tang and Song dynasties, people still regarded natural gas as a god. According to the " Taiping Guangji " Salt Well , "Lingzhou Yanjing was dug by the Later Han Immortals, Peiguo Zhang Daoling , which is four feet long and forty feet deep... It is regarded as a god, and is also commonly known as a spirit at the bottom of the well, so it must not be thrown into fire or dirty. There will be water drawn, and the fire falls by mistake, which means boiling, rushing smoke, and rushing mud and drifting stones, which is very scary." The smoke recorded here refers to the natural gas in the salt well.
As early as the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, people dug the first natural gas well in Linqiong, Sichuan and used it to boil salt. According to the Shu Han Dynasty's "Book of King Shu": "HTM1 Linqiong has a fire well, which is more than 60 zhang deep." Jin Zhang Hua "HTM1 Museum History " Volume 9: "The fire well in Linqiong is five feet wide and two or three zhang deep. The well is a hundred miles south of the county. In the past, people threw bamboo and wood to make fire. Prime Minister Zhuge looked at it, and then the fire turned into a strong one. Hold a basin and cover the well, boil salt, and get salt." When the fire well was first discovered, people only knew its flammability, but there were very few airflows in shallow wells with two or three zhang deep. The soil was called "turf fire". This airflow could not last for a long time and had not been fully utilized. When Zhuge Liang heard that natural gas was discovered in Linqiong area, he went to inspect it himself and guided people to do further digging and deep exploration. In this way, the fire well became prosperous and began to use the fire well to boil salt. Previously, they used firewood to heat and boil salt.
Eastern Jin Chang Yu's "Huayang Guozhi·Shuzhi" also records: "Linqiong County...there is a fire well. Night time reflects the Zhao (Zhao). People want to buy fire, first throw it with the fire at home. After a while, like thunder, the flames come out, and it shines for dozens of miles... There are two wells, one dry and one water. Take the well fire and cook it. One hu of water will get five dou of salt. When the fire is boiled at home, there will be few." Obviously, after Linqiong's natural gas was developed and used to boil salt, people found that the effect of boiling salt with natural gas is more effective than the firewood at home. The fruit is good, the salt production rate is greatly improved, and even one hu of water can get five dou of salt. This is a gratifying result of people's development and utilization of natural gas at that time. Zhuge Liang also contributed to this!
my country and the earliest developed natural gas field in the world, , is a self-lift well gas field in Zigong City, Sichuan, Fushun County and Rongxian . It was called the self-lift well site in ancient times.
As early as Warring States period , the famous water conservancy expert Li Bing discovered salt halide in the construction of Dujiangyan , and then "passed through Guangdu salt well". People began to dig wells to draw halide and obtain well salt , but these are all large shallow wells. At the same time, Li Bing discovered a "fire well" while digging a well, and later used natural gas as fuel to boil salt.
, people from Zhuoting Town, Daying County, Sichuan Province invented the Zhuoting Well harbor harvesting technology , and gradually replaced the large shallow well with a small deep well, which was called Zhuoting Well. Song Su Shi recorded in "Shu Yanshu": "Since the Qingli Emperor, Shu started to create the 'Zhu Tube'. A circular blade was used to chisel, as big as a bowl, and tens of feet deep were used to remove the sections of giant bamboo , and the male and female were connected to form a well, and the distance between them went into fresh water, and the salt springs came up from the top."The diameter of this well is only the size of a bamboo tube, but it can drill wells up to tens of feet deep. It is called "the fifth largest invention in ancient China" and "the father of the world's oil drilling".
All of this created conditions for the development of the Ziliujing gas field. After the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, salt gas wells with a depth of more than 800 meters appeared one after another, and shallow gas layers constructed by the Ziliujing gas well were developed on a large scale. According to Qing Li Rong "Shisanfeng Bookstore Manuscripts·Ziliujing Records": Ziliujing District "In the early years of Daoguang, people who burned salt often used firewood and charcoal to lure the well fire. It was in the seventh or eighth year of Xianfeng, and it was in the 2nd year of Tongzhi html... Decheng well water, brine water fumes people until death, can burn five hundred pots, water sprays out from the well mouth, can reach three or four meters high, and can accumulate more than a thousand ducts day and night." This shows that in the early years of Daoguang in the Qing Dynasty, gas wells drilled for natural gas were successful and began to mine deeper gas layers. The most famous of them is Haishunjing, which has a natural gas output of more than 700 salt stoves at the same time. In the 20th year of Daoguang in the Qing Dynasty, it drilled into a high-yield natural gas well with a depth of 1,200 meters. It is the mozi well , known as the "King of Fire", and can still burn more than 400 pots after twenty years.
The ancients discovered that natural gas was excavated, so how did they store and transport it under the technical conditions at that time?
According to the historian of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Chang Yu recorded in "Huayang Guozhi·Shuzhi": "If you use a bamboo tube to hold the light, you can keep it all day long." In the note of " Shudu Fu ", it also said that "you use a bamboo tube to hold it and it will be filled with light without charcoal." It is mentioned here that using a bamboo tube to hold natural gas, and "can be destroyed all day long" is indeed very strange. It seems that similar to today's gas storage tank , people used "bamboo tubes" to bring natural gas home for use.
During the Daoguang period of the Qing Dynasty, Wang Peixun, who had served as an official in Rongxian and other places, recorded a lot of local development and use of natural gas in his "Tingyulou Essay", which stated that people used "pig vegetation to nourish them, and they could give them far away" and used pig urine to transport natural gas was indeed good. Volume 2 of "Fushun County Chronicles" compiled by Duan Yucai during the Qianlong period recorded another transportation method: "I once had a skin capsule, traveled thousands of miles, and over several months, the acupoints were guided by fire, and the light and flame remained unabated." It was even more wonderful to make storage bags with animal skin, put natural gas, and even transport it to places thousands of miles away.
In the pipeline transportation, the ancients also tried their best. In the Song Dynasty, Kong Pingzhong recorded in "Tanyuan" that when Shaozhou mined copper mines, natural gas was also accompanied by toxicity. They used long bamboo tubes to guide the natural gas to the ground, ignite it and test whether it was toxic, and then carry out construction. The Ming Dynasty scientist Song Yingxing recorded the transportation of natural gas in his volume 5 of "Handsalt, Well Salt", "The bamboo pipe transportation technology at that time was relatively mature: "Hands of Xichuan have a fire well, and it is very strange. The well was actually cold water and there was no fire, but it was cut open with long bamboo and cut off the sections, inserted one end into the bottom of the well, and connected it with a curved end to the navel of the kettle, and poured it into the brine of the kettle. The fire was burning, and the water boiled. When you opened the bamboo and looked at it, there was no slight ignition."
Around the first year of Tongzhi in the Qing Dynasty, Lin Qigong, a Fujian technician, completely solved the problem of long-distance gas transmission. He used bamboo and log as materials, broke it into two halves and opened the middle bamboo joints or hollowed out the center of the log, then put it together again and wrapped it tightly with a linen, applied a layer of tung oil, dried it, connected it one by one to make a gas pipeline. According to the "Sichuan Salt Minute", there were twelve bamboo gas pipelines invented by Lin Qigong at that time used in the Ziliujing gas field.
Later, advanced technical equipment such as wellhead control, metering and transportation of natural gas were invented. According to the "Sichuan Yanfazhi" records: After the natural gas well is drilled, a virtual bottom wooden barrel is covered on the wellhead. After being closed and reinforced, small holes are left on the barrel and bamboo tubes are installed to lead natural gas out from the ground. In order to measure the output of natural gas, people installed a row of upright small bamboo tubes on the horizontal air outlet pipes, and then ignited them one by one. Based on the flame height and the number of ignited bamboo tubes, the output of natural gas was calculated. This method of measuring natural gas is very accurate and is almost the same as it is now.
Qilu Yidian
