What if Japan had the Sakhalin Oil in 1939?

The Sandman

Banned
Throw in a geological POD, just one shallow deposit that will show Japan where to begin just what happened in the US, and your timeline works. It's that simple.

For a slightly different geological POD, why not have an earthquake (perhaps one of the distant effects of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, if possible) just happen to rupture the rock layer in between those deep oil deposits and a route to the surface?

That would also provide impetus for a crash program into searching for similar deposits; given the economic effects of the 1923 earthquake on Japan, they're going to leap on this sort of valuable resource deposit like a starving lion on a gazelle.
 
Japan occupied Northern Sakhalin from 1920 to 1925 and started exploiting the oil resources there. See here: http://www.sakhalin.ru/Engl/Region/book/from_portsmouth.htm

Japan continued to exploit a part of Northern Sakhalin's oil resources from 1925 to 1944, while Northern Sakhalin was Soviet territory. See here:
http://www.globalcollab.org/Nautilu...older/sakhalin-gas-dream-or-nightmare-part-1/
I am very far from saying that they had a realistic chance of increasing their production significantly, and I am not saying that, if they could have done that, this would have solved their energy problems. I am ignorant on both points.

Still: Kindly take these aspects of OTL reality into account!!
:):)
 
Either way they will do fine. Although it is more likely that they would enjoy a period of peace and resources until about 1942 (when Russia is busy) and then take Eastern Siberia.

The Soviets blow up the railway, then sit back until the war in the West is over, then come back and make Japan very very sorry.

With Japanese logistics, Irkutsk may as well be as far as the moon.

I'll see where Stalin moved the factories to. Just east of the Urals is well out of the way of Japan.

North Kazakhstan, Urals, Central and Western Siberia. None of these places are reachable by the Japanese within a reasonable timeframe.
 

perfectgeneral

Donor
Monthly Donor
Japan occupied Northern Sakhalin from 1920 to 1925 and started exploiting the oil resources there. See here: http://www.sakhalin.ru/Engl/Region/book/from_portsmouth.htm

Japan continued to exploit a part of Northern Sakhalin's oil resources from 1925 to 1944, while Northern Sakhalin was Soviet territory. See here:
http://www.globalcollab.org/Nautilu...older/sakhalin-gas-dream-or-nightmare-part-1/
I am very far from saying that they had a realistic chance of increasing their production significantly, and I am not saying that, if they could have done that, this would have solved their energy problems. I am ignorant on both points.

Still: Kindly take these aspects of OTL reality into account!!
:):)
You struck the mother load there. Thanks. This seems to give the whole POD the green light, without the need for a second POD for discovery. It would just need a clearer view of the extent of the oil and gas available and full control over it.
 
Last edited:
You struck the mother load there.


PG,

Not quite, sadly.

Reading AMF's first link reveals that Japan received between 1929 to 1937, 740,000 tons of Sakhalin oil. During 1942, the IJN alone required 305,000 months per month and still saw it's operations restrained by a lack of fuel.

It took nearly a decade for Japan to get enough oil out of Sakhalin to fuel it's wartime Navy for all of two months.

The deposits in Sakhalin exploited during the 1930s and 40s were those shallow deposits we talked about earlier and those deposits were not extensive enough to meet Japan's needs.

The deposits identified and exploited from the 1970s onward are deep deposits which, once again, Japan does not have the theories, techniques, and technology to predict, locate, and exploit.

Again, all you need do is recreate that happy accident from the Texas fields in which a deep deposit was located near a shallow one and thus could be found by "mistake".

Good luck.


Regards,
Bill
 
PG,


Reading AMF's first link reveals that Japan received between 1929 to 1937, 740,000 tons of Sakhalin oil. During 1942, the IJN alone required 305,000 months per month and still saw it's operations restrained by a lack of fuel.

It took nearly a decade for Japan to get enough oil out of Sakhalin to fuel it's wartime Navy for all of two months.

The deposits in Sakhalin exploited during the 1930s and 40s were those shallow deposits we talked about earlier and those deposits were not extensive enough to meet Japan's needs.

The deposits identified and exploited from the 1970s onward are deep deposits which, once again, Japan does not have the theories, techniques, and technology to predict, locate, and exploit.

Again, all you need do is recreate that happy accident from the Texas fields in which a deep deposit was located near a shallow one and thus could be found by "mistake".
What you say about the quantity of oil is perfectly valid and you certainly know a lot more about oil and geology than I do.

But there is something wrong with your sentence that starts with the words
"The deposits in Sakhalin exploited during the 1930s and 40s were those shallow deposits we talked about earlier..."
You certainly did not talk about any deposits exploited by the Japanese on Sakhalin earlier, but always held the position that the Japanese could not possibly find any oil on Sakhalin. See your post number 4:
Code:
 Sakhalin does have oil, but Sakhalin does not have oil Japan can both find and exploit in the 1930s. As I routinely point out in threads of this type, oil prospecting and drilling technology is the controlling factor here and not the presence of oil itself.

Only the US has the requisite drilling technology in this period and it's something they won't be sharing with Japan anytime soon. No one has the requisite prospecting technology, no one has even developed the "petro-geology" theories yet that developing the prospecting technology requires.

Deep drilling the US was developed due to a geological fluke; relatively shallow deposits happened to be above deeper ones. The wildcatters who scoured the US fields looking for deep fields did so with a "hunt & peck" method. They had rough rules of thumb and intuition, used dowsers, and snapped up leases alongside already proven deep fields. No one of these methods would be at work in Sakhalin. The surface geology is too different for rules of thumb or intuition, dowsers work about as well as flipping a coin, and there's no proven deep fields to drill next door to.

The oil is down there alright, there just aren't surface indications of that fact which were known in the 1930s.
To insist on the difference between little oil and no oil might be nitpicking in other circumstances, but I think under these circumstances it is not. You may be an expert on oil drilling in general, but it is very unlikely that you are an expert on the history of oil drilling in Sakhalin - not that I claim any expertise there, but I think it exceedingly unlikely that the people who owned the sites I have provided the link to are making this bit of history up.
 
AMF,

I'm going to explain this to you once, so I want you to pay attention.

Perfectgeneral's initial post referenced the current day Sakhalin Hydrocarbon Region. His questions had to do with the earlier discovery of that oil, oil in deep deposits. All of my comments have had to with that oil, oil in deep deposits. I may not have written the word "deep" every time I wrote the word "oil", but I was writing about deep deposits every time. Understand?

As is shown in the links that you yourself provided, the amount of oil recoverable by 1930s/40s technology on Sakhalin is a pittance compared to Japan's peacetime needs, let alone her wartime requirements.

You can play whatever semantic games you want and pick at whatever nits you can find, but the end result is still the same. Japan cannot recover enough oil from Sakhalin to make any difference unless technology is advanced or a happy accident occurs.

Of the two, the happy accident results in far fewer butterflies.


Bill
 
AMF,

I'm going to explain this to you once, so I want you to pay attention.

Perfectgeneral's initial post referenced the current day Sakhalin Hydrocarbon Region. His questions had to do with the earlier discovery of that oil, oil in deep deposits. All of my comments have had to with that oil, oil in deep deposits. I may not have written the word "deep" every time I wrote the word "oil", but I was writing about deep deposits every time. Understand?

As is shown in the links that you yourself provided, the amount of oil recoverable by 1930s/40s technology on Sakhalin is a pittance compared to Japan's peacetime needs, let alone her wartime requirements.

You can play whatever semantic games you want and pick at whatever nits you can find, but the end result is still the same. Japan cannot recover enough oil from Sakhalin to make any difference unless technology is advanced or a happy accident occurs.

Of the two, the happy accident results in far fewer butterflies.


Bill
I have been polite to you and have conceded your possible expertise on oil drilling and geology. In return you are trying to talk to me like an NCO to a recruit ("I am going to explain this to you once so I want you to pay attention" "Understand?") I find this bad style.
Of course I understand what you are trying to say. You are trying to say that in your earlier posts you really meant to say that it is only impossible for Japan to find the deep oil deposits, while in fact you did say that Japan could not find any deposits.
At the end of your post 4 you wrote that only a different geology of Sakhalin or (impossibly) more advanced technology could result in any oil findings. Now at the end of your last post, a happy accident - which to me is not the same as a different geology or a more advanced technology - might even result in enough findings to make a difference for Japan. Have you changed your opinion or haven't you?
 
I have been polite to you...

AMF,

Large bold fonts is not "polite". Misunderstanding previous points is not "polite". Posting links which you don't realize actually proves the point that Sakhalin oil production was inconsequential is not "polite".

You've shown little comprehension of the conversation actually occurring in this thread and are now belaboring a completely inconsequential point. You've chosen to believe that the phrase "happy accident" somehow doesn't mean a geological POD despite me explicitly writing "Again, all you need do is recreate that happy accident from the Texas fields in which a deep deposit was located near a shallow one and thus could be found by "mistake"."

If you're going to ignore what I've actually written, if you're going to impose your own definitions on what I've actually written, and if you're not going to try to understand what I've actually written, then there's nothing more I can do.


Bill
 
I have been polite to you and have conceded your possible expertise on oil drilling and geology. In return you are trying to talk to me like an NCO to a recruit ("I am going to explain this to you once so I want you to pay attention" "Understand?") I find this bad style.
Of course I understand what you are trying to say. You are trying to say that in your earlier posts you really meant to say that it is only impossible for Japan to find the deep oil deposits, while in fact you did say that Japan could not find any deposits.
At the end of your post 4 you wrote that only a different geology of Sakhalin or (impossibly) more advanced technology could result in any oil findings. Now at the end of your last post, a happy accident - which to me is not the same as a different geology or a more advanced technology - might even result in enough findings to make a difference for Japan. Have you changed your opinion or haven't you?

The "happy accident" Bill mentions would be a geological POD--you would need a different geology for at least some of the fields so that some wildcatter or lucky driller accidentally hit a deep field while drilling on a shallow one. It's not, I think, a huge POD, but Bill did mention that from early on. I know he can be abrasive, but he is usually right.
 
AMF,

...Posting links which you don't realize actually proves the point that Sakhalin oil production was inconsequential is not "polite".
If you're going to ignore what I've actually written, if you're going to impose your own definitions on what I've actually written, and if you're not going to try to understand what I've actually written, then there's nothing more I can do.
In fact I have already written that I know perfectly well that OTL's quantities were very small, see below. Who is ignoring whose posts?
What you say about the quantity of oil is perfectly valid and you certainly know a lot more about oil and geology than I do.

The "happy accident" Bill mentions would be a geological POD--you would need a different geology for at least some of the fields so that some wildcatter or lucky driller accidentally hit a deep field while drilling on a shallow one. It's not, I think, a huge POD, but Bill did mention that from early on. I know he can be abrasive, but he is usually right.
First of all I must point out the seemingly obvious: only if the shallow fields are known and exploited to some extent is the POD that you describe possible. Precisely because of this it makes a big difference whether the Japanese already were exploiting the fields in OTL, with however small results, as I have pointed out in my first post, or whether they were totally ignorant of any deposits, even the smaller surface ones, as Bill Cameron seemed to imply in his first posts.
Now, apparently the Japanese did not have the lucky break in OTL that is described in your post. Theoretically, this can have two reasons:

  • such deep deposits beneath shallow ones don't even exist in OTL. In this case a geological POD is needed.
  • such deep deposits beneath shallow ones do exist but the Japanese did not have the luck to discover them. In this case, no geological POD is needed.
To know which of these is true we need an expert on Sakhalin's geology, who can say with some certainty: Yes, deep deposits like that exist or No, deposits like that don't exist. Bill Cameron's statements so far are consistent with either version and the fact that he failed to mention the actual exploitation of deposits on Sakhalin by the Japanese is at least not apt to confirm his expertise on this particular point.
 
Last edited:
Who cares? A lucky driller discovers a deep deposit by accident, be it an OTL deposit or a made up one. What happens next??? :):):)
 
This is a good question. Obviously, they would not be as reliant upon the U.S. for oil. Maybe they could create a Yamato Dynasty in China, but in the end, the Chinese would assimilate their conquerers. There's still the issue of scrap metal however.
 
Who cares? A lucky driller discovers a deep deposit by accident, be it an OTL deposit or a made up one. What happens next??? :):):)


Juanml82,

Exactly. As I've written repeatedly, all the POD Perfectgeneral's timeline needs is a single happy accident.


Regards,
Bill
 
There was slightly more oil available from Sakhalin/Karafuto using 1940 technology than has been mentioned. The figures given so far are from the Japanese concession and are not too different from an unsourced estimate from Wikipedia of 1,000,000 barrels per year or about 140,000 tons. However, http://www.sturmvogel.orbat.com/SovOil.html gives 588,000 tons for the Soviet output for 1940 rising to 1,200,000 tons by 1945. Thus we can guess that Japan might produce a similar output, perhaps slightly earlier because it would have been the major Japanese source of oil.

What were Japan's minimum requirements? http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/japan-oil.htm#table gives 3,680,000 tons of imports in 1935 rising to around 5,000,000 in 1940 (presumably due to the war in China and a larger fleet) referencing B.R. Mitchell "International Historical Statistics 1750-1993" and Walter J. Levy "Oil Strategy and Politics, 1941-1981".

Thus Sakhalin could have produced approximately a third of Japan's peace time requirement and around 20% of the 1940 requirement or as Bill notes around 2-4 months of the WW2 fleet requirement. Clearly that is not going to have a huge effect by itself. It may slightly reduce the urgency of the Japanese negotiations, especially if the extra output has allowed larger stockpiles to be assembled. Clearly if Japan has time (two or three months) to reflect on Germany's failure to take Moscow, they may try harder to reach a negotiated settlement. However, there probably wasn't a deal available unless something happens. The luckiest something for Japan would be an incident starting a Germany - USA war. Then the USA would really prefer Japan to not pin down a significant fraction of the Anglo-American forces and might end the embargo in return for a ceasefire in China with an agreement to withdraw over three years (Manchuria included/excluded?) on the calculation that in three years time they will have won WW2 and can tell Japan exactly what to do. However, after WW2 perhaps they will need allies against the USSR.

The butterflies of the 1905 POD will spread rather wider. Firstly, Japan will have four times as much oil production. The extra oil men are more likely to find more oil, for example in Manchuria. Secondly, Japan will be just a little richer with unclear effects. Thirdly, without wanting to seize Sakhalin, perhaps Japan is less interested in a Siberian intervention? If the Siberian intervention were mostly an Anglo-American operation, Japan's relations with the USSR might be different. If Japanese troops were needed, perhaps political deals involving China might be made?

And finally, if Japan received Sakhalin in the Portsmouth Treaty, Japan's relations with the USA would almost certainly have been better! They may deteriorate but it is also possible that Japan would have welcomed more US investment and that US companies would have exerted influence to keep business running smoothly.
 
Great stuff, MH!

I have to agree on the post-Portsmouth butterflies here. The political situation for Japan was...interesting. With the marginal increase in economic factors from Sakhalin oil that could possibly mean more money and influence for the civilian and democratic factions within Taisho democracy and could possibly butterfly the Militant Nationalist rise to power in part or in full. Best case for Japan they avoid protracted war in China entirely.

Also, economic partnerships between Japanese and the US companies were on the table in TR's time. Frex E. H. Harriman was in talks with Japan to establish rail lines in the Japanese Manchurian protectorate as part of a planned trans-global transportation system (rail & ship). It was torpedoed OTL by a Japanophobe who found his way into a position of influence within the ambassador's office (I forget the name...it's in my Teddy Roosevelt and Japan book at home).

All said there's always an ATL possibility for a much more civilian/democratic and pro-American Japan in an early 20th C. POD, this one among them.
 
Top