Though the Austrian Empire's oil production capacity was currently excessive, forcing Franz to personally step in to absorb the surplus and even build a storage system from scratch, he knew full well that once the automobile industry took off, the empire's oil reserves would not last more than a few years. If they squandered it without restraint as in history, supply and demand would soon be thrown upside down.
That was why Franz had set his sights early on Tripoli, the place closest to the Austrian Empire. Digging through more than a thousand meters of strata by hand truly was a fantasy from the Arabian Nights.
But human technology was constantly advancing, and breakthroughs in well-drilling technology were not actually all that complicated.
Put simply, at first there were only human- and animal-powered percussion drills. Reaching one hundred meters underground was already a remarkable feat, though with enough determination, one could likewise drill down a thousand meters—there were records of this in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
However, relying entirely on manpower to drill below one thousand meters required not only a group of extraordinarily diligent people, but a great deal of time. Franz had no interest in spending more than a decade of his life just drilling a single well.
All he needed to do was replace human power with steam power, and efficiency could rise dozens of times over. After all, in history, a steam-powered percussion drilling rig cobbled together by an American farmer had reached two thousand meters underground in less than a year.
Franz did not believe the technological prowess of the entire Austrian Empire could be inferior to one farmer's flash of inspiration, a farmer who had never studied engineering or mechanics.
Historically, that farmer had used an old six-horsepower steam engine. For the Austrian