“Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient China’s Ingenious Gas Drilling: A Hidden History of Energy Innovation”
But perhaps their greatest achievement was building hundreds of kilometres of bamboo pipelines that carried brine and natural gas as far away as Beijing. As bamboo is naturally divided into closed compartments, building these pipelines was not a matter of simply joining lengths of bamboo together. Instead, the bamboo was split in half, the dividing walls carved away, and the two halves joined back together with lime and Tung oil cement. The joint was further reinforced using twine wound around the outside of the pipe. So durable and gas-tight were these pipes that as recently as the 1950s there were still over 95 kilometres of bamboo pipeline still in operation around the Sichuan city of Zigong.
The vast scale of the Sichuan salt and brine operations had a significant impact on Chinese history and culture. The slow pace of drilling and extraction meant that derricks and boiling facilities had to be manned 24 hours a day. Consequently, some of the first legal contracts in Chinese history were drawn up by Sichuan salt merchants to negotiate the allocation of workers and other resources. On a larger scale, the scramble for valuable salt and gas attracted hundreds of thousands of people and from across China and surrounding countries, creating in a volatile, conflict-ridden frontier melting pot and giving Sichuan the diverse cultural makeup it enjoys to this day.
Sichuan was not the only hydrocarbon extraction operation of the Early Modern period. In the 12th Century, small oil wells were dug near Naples in Italy, while in the 13th Century Venetian explorer Marco Polo described oil extraction at Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan:
