Will Bamboo Pipe Take Away The Brine And Gas From Zigong?

 Bamboo pipelines used to transport brine and natural gas were developed by the Chinese in the Zigong area of ​​Sichuan around 1000 AD. (and possibly much earlier). Up until the 1950s, more than 95 km of bamboo pipelines were still in operation in the immediate vicinity of Zigong. 

In the 1700s, wells in Sichuan were typically 300–400 m deep. One line of bamboo pipes carried away the brine and another line carried the gas. By the late mid-20th century AD, workers had developed a system of leather valves and bamboo pipes that sucked in both the brine and the natural gas they burned to boil the brine (the technology they had developed for bamboo pipes was finally applied to domestic plumbing). system). Some found that natural gas could be combustible and then fed through bamboo pipes to a centralized boiling zone where it could be used to extract brine. 

Brine from deep wells flowed through a row of bamboo tubes on a roller coaster to hot natural gas boilers that turned the brine into salt. Wells began simply by digging in salt water, however it was found that the brine was more concentrated the deeper it could be drawn. It was Li Bin who discovered that the natural brine from which the salt was obtained does not come from the pools where the natural brine was located, but is filtered from the depths. Since then, wells in Sichuan have penetrated the ground to access saline aquifers (groundwater with a salinity of more than 50 grams per liter), and various evaporation methods have been used to produce usable salt. 

Salt wells have been found mostly in present-day Sichuan, but it wasn't until the Song Dynasty that technological advances led to increased production and consequent tax revenues (the combination of gas and brine had been used since ancient times, but did not reach usable volumes for transportation at any distance for sale even later, in the middle of the twentieth century). There are cases of extraction and use of oil and gas in other parts of China dating back to 61 BC, but it seems that the salt and hydrocarbon industries were separated for a long time and that the use of gas in the Zigong area was largely limited . to the production of salt. Zigong City continues to be a major salt producer, and many historic wells are still in operation. During the Song Dynasty, natural gas was used to evaporate brine to produce large-scale salt, and the salt was sold all over China. 

A major breakthrough came at some point in the 16th century with the development of methods for exploiting natural gas discovered while drilling with brine. Natural gas was coming out of the brine they were extracting, so they figured out how to create an elaborate bamboo pipeline to bring the gas to the salt marshes. After drilling wells from 2,297 to 2,625 feet (700 to 800 m), they can produce both brine and gas from the Triassic formations of the Jialingjiang Group. More