Luo Yuanfeng replied: "Caomin is willing to pay 200,000 taels of silver. As for the manpower, Caomin arranged half of the blacksmiths." "Okay, our Xinyuantang invested about 5 million taels of silver, and the total investment is expected to be about 10 million taels. You now invest 200,000 taels. With your skilled blacksmith, we can calculate about 500,000 taels of shares for you, which can account for about 5% of the shares. But this number is not very accurate, after all, I am not a businessman. For specific matters, you should ask Manager Zhao of our Xinyuantang to discuss it separately." Li Guodong nodded and said.

What Li Guodong wants is not only capital, but more importantly technology. Each iron company has its own specialty products. If Li Guodong wants to produce a variety of steel products of different properties, he needs to recruit talents to himself.

"The total investment of 10 million taels of silver?" Luo Yuanfeng exclaimed, "Dude, you invest five million per person? Can you make money on such a large scale?"

Ten million taels of silver are astronomical property no matter which era they are placed. Ten million taels are calculated according to their value and are equivalent to more than one billion yuan later; if it is based on purchasing power, it would be even more terrible. In the late Ming Dynasty, the purchasing power of one tael of silver was equivalent to at least one thousand yuan, and ten million taels were equivalent to more than one billion yuan.

"If you think you can't, Li won't force it." Li Guodong said with a smile.

"I vote!" Luo Yuanfeng hesitated for a moment and finally made up his mind.

With Luo Yuanfeng starting, two shopkeepers signed up to buy shares, but other shopkeepers, including Tao Gui, were still hesitant. They did not think that such a large steel plant could make money. Investing 10 million taels of silver to build a steel plant, how big should the steel plant be? How much iron should be produced every year? Is it possible to use so much iron? The market must be saturated.

Li Guodong smiled and said to Luo Yuanfeng and the two investor shopkeepers: "When the iron plant starts, if no one else invests, your shareholding ratio will automatically increase."

Although most of the shopkeepers in the iron store have not decided to invest, with a good start, Li Guodong is not worried that others will not be moved after seeing the achievements of the steel factory. At that time, he will be able to let those shopkeepers come in with funds and people. Moreover, the later the shopkeepers who invest, the lower the proportion of shares they can get. If they invest earlier, the shares will rise.

After preliminary negotiations, Li Guodong began to build a coking plant.

Li Guodong did not study chemical engineering in his previous life, so after he came to this era, he did not start a coking plant at the beginning, and only conducted small-scale coking experiments before. Now his coking technology is very mature.

The coal used in Guangdong is all high-quality coal from Annan. The coal in Annan has low sulfur content and particularly high carbon content, which is especially suitable for coking in this era.

Li Guodong did not know how to make sulfuric acid. If he could know how to make sulfuric acid, he would not mind coal with high sulfur content. When coking, the sulfur dioxide emitted from coal with high sulfur content can be collected and used to catalyze it into sulfur trioxide to obtain sulfuric acid. Since Li Guodong did not know how to make sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide was useless waste gas for him.

But he thought of another way: he could collect sulfur dioxide, react with distilled water, form sulfurous acid, and temporarily preserve it. When the sulfurous acid is placed in the air, part of the sulfurous acid will oxidize to sulfuric acid, but the purity of this sulfuric acid is very low, and a large amount of sulfurous acid is mixed in it, which cannot be used to make weapons at all.

In fact, Li Guodong has been exploring a way to produce sulfuric acid in an industrial manner. As long as there is sulfuric acid, you can get nitric acid. With sulfuric acid and nitric acid, you can get a weapon with even greater power.

The difference between explosives and gunpowder is the intensity. In fact, the energy released by these two things when burning is almost the same, but the combustion time of explosives is shorter and can release all its energy in the shortest time, so its power is much greater than gunpowder.

However, even with sulfuric acid and nitric acid, Li Guodong could not create explosives with great power. At best, it would create fire cotton gunpowder that was more powerful than black gunpowder. The fire cotton gunpowder he could make could not be used as a launching medicine for guns and cannons, because he did not know how to passivate gunpowder and slow down the burning speed of gunpowder, so that it could be used for guns and cannons to fire.

Smokeless gunpowder is indeed a very heart-warming gunpowder. With this kind of launching medicine, firearms and soldiers will not be deeply trapped in thick smoke in the future, and the power of guns and cannons will become even greater. However, Li Guodong does not know how to make smokeless gunpowder launch medicine, so even if he can make fire cotton, it can only be used to fill grenades and flowering shells.

On the riverside northwest of Huizhou, Li Guodong asked Song Yingxing and Fang Yizhi to survey the terrain and choose the location for the construction of the factory.

"We should enter this tributary, walk upstream for a while, find a place to build a dam, block the river and store water, so that we can use water trucks to provide factory use." Song Yingxing said, pointing to a small tributary in the Dongjiang River.

"Let's set up the steel plant under the dam, and the coking plant is downstream." Li Guodong said.

After all, coking plants do not need to use hydraulic machinery to drive them. Just send coal into the coke oven and heat the air for two days, two to three days and three nights to obtain coke that can be used for iron smelting.

Although Li Guodong is not a chemical engineering student, he also knows that gas is produced when coking. The gas produced when coking is used to heat it to the coking oven, which can save the consumption of coal used for coking.

"Shopkeeper Luo, this is the coke oven drawing I drew. Can you build ten such coke ovens in two months? The pig iron and bricks consumed will be converted into your investment." Li Guodong took out the drawing and handed it to Luo Yuanfeng.

Luo Yuanfeng looked carefully at the drawings and patted his chest to promise: "Don't worry, it's absolutely fine. If it cannot be completed or does not meet the requirements, you can punish the people for money."

The key to the coking oven is to have good sealing properties. If the seal is poor, a large amount of air will enter during the coking process, causing coal to be wasted in the combustion.

With Luo Yuanfeng Iron Walking's technology, there is no problem in doing this.

The factory building of the coking plant is also under construction. After Song Yingxing and Fang Yizhi selected the factory site, Li Guodong ordered the engineers to pull up ropes around and encircle a circle of land.

Those lands have their own land, even on hills and slopes, they belong to landlords and gentry. Most of the landlords and gentry here have various kinship relationships with the shopkeepers of Huizhou Iron Store. Li Guodong could not forcibly confiscate their land, but instead took a relatively mild approach, took out money to buy land, and told them that they could invest in the steel company at any time.

Of course, I also encountered resistance when expropriating the land. Some people who were stubborn thought that the land was the foundation and refused to sell it. When they met that kind of person, Li Guodong asked the Jinyiwei to come forward and sent them to the temporary Zhao Prison in Huizhou for a period of time. Then he showed out various torture instruments. Those people surrendered and expressed their willingness to sell the land.

After successfully seizing the land, the engineers dispatched by Li Guodong also arrived in Huizhou.

As soon as the engineers arrived in Huizhou, they immediately entered the construction. Some of them built brick kilns to prepare for firing refractory bricks and ordinary building bricks; some began to dig foundations, some went to the mountains to dig stones and cut wood, and some went to the river to dig river sand.

Everything is in full swing, and the parts of the first coke oven built in Luo Yuanfeng's iron shop have also been completed, and these parts are shipped to the construction site of the coke plant.

After the parts were delivered to the construction site, the engineers cooperated with the iron shop craftsmen to build the first coke oven with the parts and refractory bricks.
Chapter completed!