German fuel situation and what to improve on it, 2.0

[33k in the air]

Hmmmm... didnt do the British research quite as well as might be expected.

View attachment 720290

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I wonder what the authors' reply would be to these documents. Were the documents publicly available in 1987?

 

[Deleted member 68059]

I wonder what the authors' reply would be to these documents. Were the documents publicly available in 1987?

The first one is from AVIA-15/147, although there is a 2nd "closed" sticker which has been torn off, so its possible
it may have been kept under lock and key a bit longer. The white "closed" stickers are usually about 1990`s.

The second one is:

This one doesnt have a sticker, but the archive description suggests 30 year classification which would make it 1946+30 = 1976

These are pretty arcane files, I think its most likely they never got to reading them.

 

[Deleted member 68059]

Something they perhaps could have done better, in forward planning, would have been to try to open up more Bitumous coal reserves, or make mining of it easier. One big issue they had was that the REALLY good aviation fuel they had "C2" which was even better than "C3", could only be made from hydrogenating Bitumous coal, Lignite, which they had more
of in active mining potentiality in the war wasnt good enough to make "C2", so they had to give up on it and make "C3" instead, which caused all sorts of major problems, in addition to it being of lower overall power potentiality.

--
"The fuel of the quality of C2 can only be produced by starting with hard coal (Steinkohle) as a feed material or at the expense of the yield and with significant effort. A complete transition with future engines to the use of C2 fuel would therefore entail a restriction of the available raw material base and thus a significant reduction in production. Considering the great effort it takes to increase the achievable mean effective pressure by fuel developments alone, achieving only a gain of 1 technical atmosphere (ata), instead by relatively simple measures, such as the application of split injection (a DVL process to inject the fuel in two stages), the knock limit curves can be significantly improved, therefore one should leave nothing untried to improve the knock resistance of the engine by such measures, to make this possible - to the highest practical extent. Engine builders and fuel manufacturers must work together and collaborate so that Germany remains superior to their enemies in terms of the quality of their aircraft."
--

For reference "C1" is basically indentical to Allied 100 Octane in composition. You can see that C3 allows higher boost than 100 octane at rich mixture
and C2 is better than both at every point.

B4 is the bog standard "87/89 octane" stuff

I dont know enough about German coal mining to know if thats something which could have been done or not.

 

[marathag]

Something they perhaps could have done better, in forward planning, would have been to try to open up more Bitumous coal reserves, or make mining of it easier.

Wasn't til PostWar that the Germans introduced Dragline Excavators for open pit mining. Tech was in the US before 1900 and in limited use in the UK before WWII.

Far cheaper in labor costs and overall efficiency. Worked so well, the W. Germans went to the next level, Bucketwheel Excavators

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Yes they can. You know in peace time you can do stuff.and perhaps if other countries are getting dependend on of (sound familiar? ) the RN is not to be send in. Not all oil or gas is deep. Perhaps the should take Holland earlier for the Groninger gas. Or de wadden isle.can protect that with guns. All the arguments of not existing tech or cash is invalid. The Germans never did well on accounting but if the had known oil was that close... well (pun intended)

The Groninger gas field wasn't discovered until 1959

 

[Reluctant Poster]

I've posted on the avgas ad the Bergius process before

WW2 bombers. If Germany had the allies heavy bombers would they have won the war?

Quite the opposite. They stuck the knife in... now twist it Sorry gjs, that wasn't YOUR empire in question.

ww2aircraft.net

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Yes, similarly in many languages, with some slight variation in spelling. So we're running our cars on 'benzin' containing at most 1% benzene.



Over here we have a popular brand of household cleaning agents called 'Tolu', which I'm quite sure doesn't contain any toluene.



Wouldn't surprise me if D910 is old enough that at the time there was no benzene limit in automotive gas regulations either.

I have posted this previously

 

[Denniss]

There was not enough bitumous coal to feed them all (required by steel industry, possible chemical, I believe Steam locomotives were using it too) so they had to use lignite to produce fuel.
I believe about 2/3rd of the Bergius production capacity was processing lignite

 

[marathag]

There was not enough bitumous coal to feed them all (required by steel industry, possible chemical, I believe Steam locomotives were using it too) so they had to use lignite to produce fuel.
I believe about 2/3rd of the Bergius production capacity was processing lignite

Plenty of untapped Coal

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Plenty of untapped Coal
View attachment 720342

That's Lignite not Bituminous. Lignite is dirt and water with some carbon. It has half the heating value of bituminous and requires larger furnaces to produce the same power output. It has been tried in locomotives but did not prove to be not a practical fuel for locomotives. Lignite is mostly used in power plants in pulverized form. German attempts to use lignite in locomotives in the interwar period failed.

 

[marathag]

That's Lignite not Bituminous. Lignite is dirt and water with some carbon. It has half the heating value of bituminous and requires larger furnaces to produce the same power output. It has been tried in locomotives but did not prove to be not a practical fuel for locomotives. Lignite is mostly used in power plants in pulverized form. German attempts to use lignite in locomotives in the interwar period failed.

The East Germans used Lignite to produce Coke substitute

Hard Coal, enough to keep up prewar production. Harder to find a decent graph

 

[Denniss]

There were close to none bitumous coal deposits in East Germany (GDR) so they had to use Lignite almost everywhere where suitable. AFAIR the coal was dried to improve heating efficiency but that also cost coal to do so. The massive use of lignite for heating also caused massive air pollution, especially in winter.

 

[Snautzer01]

There were close to none bitumous coal deposits in East Germany (GDR) so they had to use Lignite almost everywhere where suitable. AFAIR the coal was dried to improve heating efficiency but that also cost coal to do so. The massive use of lignite for heating also caused massive air pollution, especially in winter.

You have never been to the Ruhr in the 70-80 ties. Now that was polution.

 

[Denniss]

Can't be worse than the Leuna-Triangle Halle-Merseburg-Bitterfeld

 

[Reluctant Poster]

There were close to none bitumous coal deposits in East Germany (GDR) so they had to use Lignite almost everywhere where suitable. AFAIR the coal was dried to improve heating efficiency but that also cost coal to do so. The massive use of lignite for heating also caused massive air pollution, especially in winter.

Domestic heating was by briquettes which were produced by pressing and heating. As you note lot of energy was required to produce them.
The following link is a patent from 1940 of a better way to make lignite briquettes.

US2310095A - Production of lignite briquettes - Google Patents

And another patent from 1926

US1607012A - Method for manufacturing briquettes from lignite - Google Patents

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Not that bad

View attachment 720181Sentinel Semi. Hook up the trailer and go.
for Off-Road work
View attachment 720182
Both 1920s. Vertical boiler. 6 ton drawbar loads typically wasn't a problem. 30mph top speed, as limited by law, not capability of it's Steam 124HP plant.

Steam HP and Gasoline HP doesn't exactly translate.

WoodGas conversions allowed existing Gasoline IC Engines to keep functioning, at lower HP ratings. Not so good for heavy goods transportation

The last stand of steam powered wagons was Sentinel in the late 30's. Foden dropped out a few years earlier

Britain Was Still Trying to Make Steam Trucks Happen in the 1930s

Sentinels could chugga-chug-chug their way up to 60 mph, but speed wasn't enough to overcome the inconvenience of steam power.

www.thedrive.com

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Almost none of the aviation fuel was from the FT plants, the vast majority (probably over 95%) was from the Bergius process plants. The FT plants
sometimes provided some chemicals used for iso-octane production, but this was an extremely minor constititent by volume and didnt occur after about 1943.

I posted previously on this subject. It discuses the advantages of the Bergius process over the FT process.

WW2 bombers. If Germany had the allies heavy bombers would they have won the war?

In the build up to D Day there was also a requirement to bomb targets away from Normandy more than Normandy itself which means targets were bombed for psychological not military reasons. It is very difficult to destroy a refinery, you can damage it and it can be repaired. It should not be...

ww2aircraft.net

 

[Reluctant Poster]

For the original question, I don't think they had any really good options. Other than not starting the war in the first place. Some random things they might (but in reality, probably not) have done:

• Run ships on pulverized coal instead of oil, to conserve oil for other uses? Maybe not energy dense and compact enough to be viable for warships? But certainly doable for slower ships, and still, pulverized coal in water tube boilers would be better than guys shoveling coal into fire tube boilers.

Pulverized cola is very hazardous, prone to fires and explosions.
Pulverizer Fire and Explosions |
See attached paper

 

[Reluctant Poster]

Nope. See below for a diagram dated 2016 showing distribution of oil and gas reserves across the North Sea area. The physical challenges of developing North Sea oil in the 1970s were huge. The technology to do it didn't exist in the 1930/40s. They are some of the deepest and roughest waters in the world.

View attachment 719841


This is the kind of rigs that had to be built from the 1970s to exploit the North Sea.
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This steel oil rig jacket was built on its side and tipped into position.

Aerial view from South East of oil platform jacket under construction and Denbeath, Methil. | Canmore

canmore.org.uk

Further North Sea oil wasn't discovered until 1969 after 3 years of exploratory drilling by multiple mobile rigs. The seabed at Ekofisk is 230 to 245 deep which is well beyond the state of the art in 1934.

History

Visit the post for more.

ekofisk.industriminne.no

Also note that Ekofisk is 200 miles from Stavanger Norway, 220 from Teesside UK and 270 miles from Emden. Even if Germany had the technology to accomplish all this the oil tanker shuttle would be a juicy target for RN submarines and surface craft as well as coastal command. Not forgetting the drilling platform themselves would be very vulnerable.

 

[MIflyer]

As far as I know the Germans were the only people to actually deploy diesel piston powered aircraft in WWII. Not sure why, but I do not think gasoline shortages were a factor. They had some seaplanes that could land and refuel from U-boats so maybe that was it.