In the Qaidam Basin, in the vast desert at the foot of mount Argin, there is an abandoned oil town that once prospered and decayed because of oil. From no man's land to a prosperous town inhabited by tens of thousands of people, it has now returned to no man's land, circled around and returned to the original point.
Cold Lake was originally no man's land. In 1954, the geological team entered the Qaidam Basin for exploration, and the following year, the geological team found a freshwater lake in the northern edge of the Qaidam Basin, the lake was very cold, so it was called the location of the cold lake, and at the same time, the oil structure was found around the cold lake, and since then the cold lake has embarked on the historical stage of oil exploitation.
Source: Petroleum Merchants Daily
Cold Lake is a place that cannot be avoided by tracing Qinghai oil no matter what. The first settlers to come to Cold Lake, we can't imagine how difficult it was at that time, but they were a generation with firm faith and revolutionary energy for hard struggle. "A roll of luggage and a pot, camels fighting in the desert, thirsty to grab the Kunlun snow, hungry to nibble on barley buns." It was the era of China's great oil shortage, and the country was in urgent need of oil.
On September 13, 1958, when the drilling team drilled the fourth well in the Cold Lake No. 5 structure of the Qaidam Basin to 650 meters, there was a well surge, followed by a strong blowout, the daily injection of crude oil was 800 tons, three days and three nights of spraying, the well site was sprayed into an oil sea, at that time there was no sufficient oil storage equipment, the crude oil out of the well could not be transported out for a while, and the exploration area headquarters had to organize personnel to build embankments to store oil, and the crude oil sprayed out was surrounded by an "oil sea". It is said that at that time, a group of wild ducks flew from the high blue sky and mistakenly regarded the "oil sea" as a lake, but they were glued to their wings by crude oil.
After the news of the oil injection came out, the national oilfield system was shaken, and then the exploration teams of all walks of life gradually concentrated in the cold lake and launched a vigorous oil conference battle, and young people with lofty ideals from all over the motherland, with the ideal and ambition of "I offer oil for the motherland", were determined to sprinkle their blood and youth in this barbaric land. As a result, Lenghu Oilfield became one of the four major oilfields in China at that time (Yumen, Karamay, Sichuan, and Lenghu), and there has been Lenghu Town on The map of China since then.
I heard that in that era, the era of the first oil reclaimers, the oil town also had its own primary school, cinema, dance hall, in the northwest desert, as long as there are people, there is no fear of no materials. Because everyone needs it, it is natural to relieve all difficulties and also to transport materials in. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cold Lake people rushed to Daqing, Shengli and other places to support construction, and once there was a saying that "where there is oil, there are Cold Lake people".
In the early 1990s, with the depletion of petroleum resources, the Cold Lake oil field fell into a trough of development, and the oil town that once had tens of thousands of people gradually became a ruin, and the oil people who had made important contributions to the development of Qinghai and the oil industry in the Cold Lake area were now empty.
The uniform ruins, from the scale of the ruins, can be imagined from the glory of that year. Not far from the site of the ruins, there is also a "modern" cold lake town. The town is fully equipped, a large gymnasium, a large shopping mall, a huge government office building, all painted and maintained to a new one. The street is clean and tidy, with a surveillance camera almost every 10 meters. Dense road greenery is particularly eye-catching in the desert.
On the street, however, there was no one. Those big buildings, it's all empty inside. The school was empty, and the tables, chairs, and benches were torn and dusty. Once here is full of tens of thousands of generations of oil children, now there is only the wind sweeping through the Gobi, and the teaching quotations on the broken walls are like a world away. On the remnants of the old base, many marks of the return of cold Lakers have been left.
There are two monuments in Lenghu: one commemorates the first oil well in the Cold Lake oil field, the four wells in the ground, and the other reads: "Comrades who died gloriously to discover the Qaidam oil industry are immortal!" ”
In the southeast corner of the Cold Lake Iv area, there is a large area surrounded by a small wall, silent in the dry cold air, which is the Cold Lake No. 4 Cemetery. It was built in September 1983 and was renovated in 1995 and 2010. More than 400 oilfield leaders, employees and family members have died of work and illness since the exploration and development of Qinghai Oilfield. In these tombs, you can see the tombstones of fathers and sons and husbands everywhere, and they stand here, watching the cold lake.
In this place on Earth like the moon, in this place where cadres and workers are the same, in the same place as this woman and man, they have found oil underground, they have established towns in the Gobi, they have camped here, they have children here, they live here, they die here...
In the minds of our generation of 80s and 90s, it is difficult to imagine the hardships of oil people in those years. The desolate Gobi Desert, the abandoned castles, the oil workers who lie underground, all these constitute the elements of all photographs and films. Thousands of kilometers away, the lights are red and the traffic is busy, which has made the world ignore these formers that laid the foundation for PetroChina. No one can say clearly what these oil people are, and the seven words "I give oil for the motherland" contain too many emotions.