Like the Panacea Potion, the first-phase output of the fuel alcohol Zhang Tie had laid out in Torch Dragon Territory was only 500,000 tons—a mere stone tossed across the river to test the way. What Zhang Tie needed was time: he needed this production base to start producing as quickly as possible. The greatest purpose of the fuel alcohol produced there was to serve as a window, to demonstrate the capabilities of fuel alcohol.
Once fuel alcohol entered the market, that little output would likely be enough only to meet the needs of a single prefecture in You Province. Faced with a market as vast as Great Xia, for something with such broad applications, its future popularity and enormous market demand were entirely foreseeable. Thus, the second matter Zhang Tie discussed with True Lord Deyang was likewise a proposal to cooperate with the Celestial Mechanism Sect and establish a larger-scale fuel alcohol production base within the Celestial Mechanism Sect's sphere of influence.
This fuel alcohol production base would no longer be on the scale of 500,000 tons. If they were doing it this time, they would do it big—starting with an annual production capacity of ten million tons.
The production and layout of a large industrial base was a specialized field. Experts were needed for matters such as site selection, production-line design and optimization, as well as supporting railway or road construction. Zhang Tie did not concern himself with these things. With the Celestial Mechanism Sect's capabilities and resources, settling such matters would take no effort at all. Zhang Tie merely handed True Lord Deyang a blueprint for a fermentation feedstock tank he had designed. That was the core component of a fuel alcohol production base. With it, as long as the fermentation tanks could continually produce fuel yeast, the