Japan discovers Daqing oil fields in 1935 - how does it change their foreign policy?

These were found OTL in 1959 but supposedly Japan came very close to them in the mid-1930s, they are enough to supply the need of Japan's military at the time and then some. How does this change Japan's foreign policy in years to come if they suddenly have a major surplus of readily exploitable oil?
 
Well if nothing else its one critical resource that Japan doesn't have to trade for, mind you building up the oil field and the needed refineries for it will take a quite a lot of time and money. Plus Japan still needs quite a few other resources... A fair few of which it could also get in Manchuria. Whether or not this limits the goal of any war against China to formal Chinese concession of Manchuria and a buffer zone and prevents a general war in the Pacific, I don't know.
 
Massively so, as it removes the need for the advance into Southeast Asia for the most part as well as opens up the possibility of further expediting Japan's rapid industrialization at the time. Most critical, however, is the fact that Strike North is most likely going to happen now....
 
No no it doesn't, rubber, scrap metal and more imports were required for a modern military, all of which were about to be embargoed. Having more oil doesn't change the fact that Japanese foreign policy of the period was determined by insane officers in Manchuria hell-bent on starting confused and undefined wars in China. Nor does it change the fact that Japan was quickly under the sway of 30-50 men who lived in the same insane bubble that would lead them to declare a war against two of the foremost naval and industrial powers in existence.

You can buy resources, much harder to buy good political sense.
 
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Anyone who isn't the USA would need 10 years to go from a test well to getting product to a refinery at this time

Yep, so it has zero impact unless somehow you get sanity in the militarists and have them wait until oil is actually in production before kicking everything off.
 
Given that Japan has some technical expertise in this field already and access to international consultants if needed would it really take ten years to develop a 'native' oil industry? Would five would be plausible, especially if the invasion of the remainder of China were delayed for whatever reason, and access to international experts/help be available?

Yep, so it has zero impact unless somehow you get sanity in the militarists and have them wait until oil is actually in production before kicking everything off.
Perhaps prudence would be an argument - as lack of oil represents such a strategic military weakness, would that make the leadership any more malleable in their thinking or planning? Yes, it affects the Navy more, but with fuel the Army would be free to develop tanks/armored warfare capacity as well...
 

Ian_W

Banned
I'm curious about this Ian and would like to learn more as you're not the first person to bring this up. Why does it take ten years to go from test wells to commercial-level production?

OK. Lets assume you drilled some wells and found some oil - lets say a couple of those wells are good, at 1000 barrels per day (if you're a Soviet and therefore metric, remember its 7 barrels to a ton). You probably have a rough idea of what formation you found that oil in. You don't know if they are small isolated pockets, or one connected field.

Therefore, more test wells and more mapping. You want to push out the limits of the field. This will get even worse if it's oil that "shouldnt" be there (like, well, Daqing. We still arent 100% sure of the age of that oil and therefore it's source rocks). This may well need more drilling rigs moved in and more crews trained.

You also are going to need a pipeline or railroad from that field to your refinery system. This may well involve building new port infrastructure as well. You're going to want decent quality roads as well.

Note you dont want to do this if you got lucky on three wells, and found three small enthusiastic 2000 bopd wells that ran for a month before starting to water out - so you are probably going to wait till you've done a lot of test wells and mapped the field correctly.

Once this is done, you may well need to 'tune' your refinery for the sort of oil you've now got - if you had an oil refinery that was designed to deal with heavy, waxy crude, then it's not going to like light but slightly sulfer tainted crude, and will need to be rebuilt.

You're also going to need to build water-handling facilities at your field, and probably housing for your new workforce, resupply and maintainence for your drilling and pipeline crews and so on.

So. Yeah. All this takes time.

From the demand side, https://defense.info/re-thinking-strategy/2018/10/oil-and-war/ is pretty good.
 

marathag

Banned
So. Yeah. All this takes time.
And Money

To reduce time, you need the fastest cutting, and longest lasting tooling.
That comes from Hughes Tooling. They don't sell, they Lease the bits. And it's not cheap, But it saves so much time and labor, was well worth it.
Hundreds of feet a day(and soft rock, hours, with the '30s tri-cone), rather than feet that you get with the older cable rigs

with 1920s tech, US Majors figured on a single test well costing $150,000 in areas like Mexico with poor infrastructure, for a 2500' bore
 
Given that Japan has some technical expertise in this field already and access to international consultants if needed would it really take ten years to develop a 'native' oil industry? Would five would be plausible, especially if the invasion of the remainder of China were delayed for whatever reason, and access to international experts/help be available?

Japan-even during WWII-was able to drill and withdraw oil from deep wells of up to 5,000 feet. The idea that Japan can't do this in a relatively quick timeframe is simply not supported by any of the available evidence.
 
No no it doesn't, rubber, scrap metal and more imports were required for a modern military, all of which were about to be embargoed. Having more oil doesn't change the fact that Japanese foreign policy of the period was determined by insane officers in Manchuria hell-bent on starting confused and undefined wars in China. Nor does it change the fact that Japan was quickly under the sway of 30-50 men who lived in the same insane bubble that would lead them to declare a war against two of the foremost naval and industrial powers in existence.

You can buy resources, much harder to buy good political sense.

Yes it does, for one oil self-sufficiency eliminates the movement into Southern Indochina, which triggered the sanctions in the first place; that was clearly only an offensive move directed at the Netherlands East Indies. Likewise, oil exports in the Pre-War Era gives Japan hard currency to develop its own artificial rubber system and stockpile in the meantime, just like Germany and the United States did.
 
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Anyone who isn't the USA would need 10 years to go from a test well to getting product to a refinery at this time
Whenever I see early oil discovery TL’s, people say this, but they don5 provide the dquality tails. Yes. The Japanese don’t have the oil drilling experience or technology of the Americans in 1935, but how did you come to the conclusion that it would take at least 10 years to develop the expertise and the equipment? How deep is the oil?
 
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Ian_W

Banned
Japan-even during WWII-was able to drill and withdraw oil from deep wells of up to 5,000 feet. The idea that Japan can't do this in a relatively quick timeframe is simply not supported by any of the available evidence.

Y'know, one of the finest potential quick to exploit oil fields I've ever seen is onshore East Timor.

You can literally set the ground on fire, and I know from Texas you can get workable fields at a depth of 100 feet. East Timor has some pretty good oil.

During WW2, the Japanese did not have the technical capability to use the several thousand year old Chinese invention of the "oil well with attached pump", but rather dug pits to get the crude.

Needless to say, they got two thirds of fuck all oil out of Timor during the War.

You'd hope that any power that decided on an aggressive war to sieze oil fields would put together a technical crew involving drillers and refiners.

But nope. This is apparently incompatible with the Bushido spirit or something.

Similarly, this carefully planned lack of capability was also seen with refining - they actually tried using straight crude on warships.

Now. I've seen a lot of dumb things on this forum, but Im reminded that - no matter how stupid things get around here - the actual Japanese of the Second World War were an order of magnitude more stupid.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Whenever I see early oil discovery TL’s, people say this, but they don5 provide the dquality tails. Yes. The Japanese don’t have the oil drilling experience or technology of the Americans in 1935, but how did you come to the conclusion that it would take at least 10 years to develop the expertise and the equipment? How deep is the oil?

Because we actually know something about how the oil industry works ?
 
Y'know, one of the finest potential quick to exploit oil fields I've ever seen is onshore East Timor.

You can literally set the ground on fire, and I know from Texas you can get workable fields at a depth of 100 feet. East Timor has some pretty good oil.

During WW2, the Japanese did not have the technical capability to use the several thousand year old Chinese invention of the "oil well with attached pump", but rather dug pits to get the crude.

Needless to say, they got two thirds of fuck all oil out of Timor during the War.

You'd hope that any power that decided on an aggressive war to sieze oil fields would put together a technical crew involving drillers and refiners.

But nope. This is apparently incompatible with the Bushido spirit or something.

Similarly, this carefully planned lack of capability was also seen with refining - they actually tried using straight crude on warships.

Now. I've seen a lot of dumb things on this forum, but Im reminded that - no matter how stupid things get around here - the actual Japanese of the Second World War were an order of magnitude more stupid.

This isn't supported by the historical record at all, as Japan rapidly restored oil production in the East Indies:

Borneo Oil Fields and Refineries Under Imperial Japanese Navy Control
The five raids stopped production at Balikpapan's two refineries and paraffin plant for almost six months. The Pandansari refinery was put out of action, but could be repaired; the Edeleanu plants required complete rebuilding; installations producing diesel oil and lubricants were damaged, but could be repaired quickly. With Balikpapan gone, the Japanese shifted to maximizing refined output from the Lutong complex, near Miri. In December 1944, 13th Air Force B-24s conducted a series of raids to seal off Lutong.

Predation by aggressive young American submarine commanders on Japan's tanker fleet, coupled with B-29 "Superfortress" heavy bomber and British carrier attacks on Sumatra's oil fields and refineries, caused Japan’s oil supply to dwindle and its reserves reached emergency levels by the end of 1944. In early 1945, another series of air raids destroyed Balikpapan's plants completely. These attacks virtually eliminated Borneo as a source of oil and it never again contributed to the Japanese war effort. By April 1945, oil imports dried up almost completely.

Blood for Oil: The Quest for Fuel in World War II
As it was, the Japanese had their way in the Pacific for a short time, and grabbed most of the oil of the East Indies, despite Allied attempts to destroy those facilities. For a time, the Imperial Navy and Army achieved what Hitler never did - oil independence.

Then they ran into another problem that rendered their possession of the oil fields meaningless - the second oil paradox of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese had an insufficient number of tankers to haul the needed oil to their industrial plants in the home islands and the many outposts spread across their vast empire. For the tankers they did have, they demonstrated an increasing inability to protect them from the attacks of Allied submarines, surface ships and aircraft. Oil had to travel thousands of miles to get from the fields of Balikpapan in Borneo to home ports in Japan. The Allies were lying in wait all along the route.

Immediately after taking command of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Nimitz came to an agreement with Adm. Ernest King, the Chief of Naval Operations, that "the primary objectives of the Allied armed forces were to safeguard their own supply lines and then drive westward in order to capture bases from which Japan's indispensable 'oil line' might be blocked."

One of the most important ship sinkings of the war occurred when the U.S. submarine Grenadier sank the Taiyo Maru in the summer of 1942. Over 1,000 Japanese petroleum experts and technicians were on board, heading for the Indies to spur oil production. A total of 780 of them perished in the attack. By the end of the war, 110 Japanese tankers had been made victims of American submarines, and joined the Taiyo Maru on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

"Japan's Oil Resources", Economic Geography, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1946), pp. 14-23
In contrast to the American oil wells, which are getting deeper, most of those in Japan are very shallow. The average depth of more than half of the wells is less than 1,500 feet, and there are only a very few wells which go deeper than 5,000 feet. Since the new wells with a depth of 1,500-2,000 feet are producing appreciable quantities of oil, it appears that the shallow fields are not yet exhausted.
For reference, Daqing Oil Field:
The source bed in the Daqing Oilfield is mainly Mesozoic Cretaceous sandstone of continental facies, 900 to 1,200 meters underground.
Hell, Japan even developed a 30,000 tons a month capacity of synthetic production in Manchuria too outside of conventional oil production. Even if we take the position that Japan can't, on its own, rapidly develop the oil fields why can't they bring the Americans in? Even into 1940, American oil companies were still conducting contracts with the Japanese and the very same companies were reluctant to give up their Japanese markets via sanctions.
 
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And Money

To reduce time, you need the fastest cutting, and longest lasting tooling.
That comes from Hughes Tooling. They don't sell, they Lease the bits. And it's not cheap, But it saves so much time and labor, was well worth it.
Hundreds of feet a day(and soft rock, hours, with the '30s tri-cone), rather than feet that you get with the older cable rigs

with 1920s tech, US Majors figured on a single test well costing $150,000 in areas like Mexico with poor infrastructure, for a 2500' bore

Communist China didn't get access to American drill bits until 1984 and still was developing the oil field from 1959 onwards.
 
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