Stretching German Gasoline Supply.

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I have Tooze's book, the pulp paperback one that is supposed to be produce a new Historical insights by an penetrating economic genius. The book disappoints, the economic data is sparse, the graphs completely illegible and literally nothing to do with the price of eggs anyway. Hyping a book is not uncommon but I haven't seen anything as hyped since Tomas Pikkety's "Capital". Another book that shall be brought cited but never read. Tooze has a more academic title, maybe its professional, but that book sucks. it belongs in the same bookshelf as many other historians, such as Kershaw, who prefer a haughty rant rather than a study separated by time. Central to Tooze's book is the claim that nazi economic incompetence sent Germany broke and that the solution was to invade the Soviet Union so as to obtain grain.

Totally missing is the effect of Allied economic and commerce embargos, US economic warfare (Munro doctrine in German Sth American markets) and the latter military embargos and the fact that Western Europe also grew food and the incredible expense of running even a short war such as the war with France.

Some of the impending German economic problems were real. Britain's economic problems due to war costs were real until the US rescued her with lend lease.

Tooze over states these problems and most particularly over states their cause (clearly a persistent them). He does repeat interesting points that were well known anyway but by repeating them he helps dispel the myths further. The myths are that
1 German women didn't work but sat at home for ideological reasons. (they had a higher participation rate than British women but were focussed on farms, particular family farms)
2 The German economy was on a peace time footing and not efficiently run (the lack on munitions production is due to the effort in tooling up and investments in factories that don't come to fruition till 1942. In fact the Germans couldn't even run a second shift in a factory, their labour shortage was so severe. many School leavers were forced to work as cleaners and in other vital services as a duty for 6 months since the positions couldn't be filled in any other way.


The volkswaggon factory ended up making Fi 103, V1 missiles. They were hoping for production rates of 100,000/month ie 1.2 million V1's year.
 
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It also ignores that the German economy was in horrible shape in 1933, and the Nazi economic planning wasn't focused on creating a long term stable economy from internal resources, but expanding its economy through deficit spending with plans to recoup that through economic/military expansion. Somewhat similar strategies might actually have worked internally as well without the intentions of posing an international bluffing/posturing (and obscuring of insustainability) if actually aimed at and managed more aggressively rationally. (that could include some territorial expansion, but with or without that, it really would depend on ability to establish favorable international trade while also breaking through the bonds of lingering WWI reparations) Deficit spending with less offensive military emphasis and greater focus on pure economic productivity investment to the extent of actually becoming profitable (able to shed the national debt and then some) and stable in the long run so long as they could establish/maintain favorable international commerce. (doing that with absolutely zero expansion might be tricky though ... even without grandiose aspirations of a European -or world- empire or new world order, demonstrations of force and power tend to be genuinely useful and often necessary devices in international diplomacy - the US did that well enough in the early 1900s and even with Taft's more 'passive' dollar diplomacy, at least until isolationism took hold)


The volkswaggon factory ended up making Fi 103, V1 missiles. They were hoping for production rates of 100,000/month ie 1.2 million V1's year.[/QUOTE]
That points more to mis-allocation of resources relative to more practical/useful needs at the time, but that's a logistics problem, not an economic productivity one.

From the recent discussions regarding the German economy (particularly in the strategic context) was failure to really modernize the national transportation network.

On the fuel end of things, we already had the long discussion on potential shift to alternate synthetic fuels pre-war had there been serious goals for breaking away from oil dependency altogether. (designing an infrastructure with the majority of domestic land vehicles powered by methanol -or a fuel blend with dominant methanol composition- would be high on that list along eith generally focusing on fischer tropsch plants rather than large, centralized, costly hydrogenation plants)

Small fischer tropsch plants only made sense strategically (for dispersed production) but should have been faster and cheaper to set up and fit in better in the interim period with the existing somewhat scattered transportation network and potentially be more efficient even after expansion of transportation. (predominantly localized fuel production rather than centralized, less fuel wasted due to long-distance transport from centralized production -this is only potentially, though, and reliant on fuel production being distributed at least relatively close to local demand)

Feedstocks for fischer tropsch plants should also be more flexible, with various fuel crops and agricultural waste (and wood and other organic materials/waste -preferably relatively compact and dry material) would be useful along with coal. (including the lignite Germany had in great supply)

TEL wouldn't be good for boosting alcohol based fuels' octane ratings, but you'd only really need that for aircraft use anyway (along with high energy density), and limited amounts of benzoyles and other aromatics from distillation of oil, coal, and potentially wood would be useful along with synthetically produced high-octane additives in a blend of high-energy density alcohols (probably mostly butanols), isooctane, ketones, and aromatics. (a variety of blends should work, but you need a good management of energy density, combustion qualities, and low freezing/jelling points to cope with low temperatures at altitude -vaporization qualities would be more important for carureted engines, but less problematic for fuel injected ones) You'd also want to minimize rubber and metal incompatibility/corrosion issues, but I think that may be more an issue with methanol and to some extent ethanol than most of the other fuel options in play. (and most extreme for aluminum components, so ground vehicles with iron blocks and steel fuel tanks should have fewer engineering problems except the air-cooled boxer engines Volkeswagon used might be more of a problem depending how many aluminum components were in prolonged contact with methanol -obviously something that would be worked on during the initial design phase if transition to a methanol economy had already started in the late 1930s)

Turbine engines have a lot more flexibility and lack of freezing and energy density should be the only considerations there (and vaporization during start-up, or requiring a secondary reservoir for easily vaporized, preferably smokeless fuel during start-up -ether should work well there, dimethyl ether would be the cheapest option but possibly unattractive due to pressurization requirements, maybe ether dissolved in methanol would be a more practical cheap option).
 
Hitler always intended to seek sources of oil elsewhere. The earliest overt confirmation I have found with a very quick look are his remarks at a conference at the Berghof in July 1940 when he said that after 'the destruction of Russian manpower' the German Army must drive towards the Baku oil field (in 1942 the British MEW estimated the output of this oil field at 24 million tons per year). I'm sure this was a long held intention. It would be typical of Nazi thinking to assume they would access the oil of the Caucasus long before they had actually achieved it.

This was nothing new for Germany. After WW1 Ludendorff wrote that 'Romanian oil was of decisive importance...the production of oil in Romania had increased to the limits of the possible, but this could not make good the whole shortage.' The High Command made a plan to seize the very same Baku oil field, but were beaten to it by the British who occupied it in August 1918, before being removed by the Turks. However no oil became available to the Germans before they (and the Ottomans) signed the armistice and in November the British were back. The British occupation of Baku was, according to Ludendorff, 'a serious blow to us'
Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes, and the Nazis had a view of history which did not make them great learners.

The Nazis did make efforts to mitigate the problem domestically, but nowhere near enough. State subsidies for exploration resulted in an increase in domestic crude production from 238,000 tonnes in 1933 to 1,052,000 tonnes in 1940.
When the Nazis came to power there were only three synthetic fuel plants operating in Germany on a virtually experimental basis. Despite the high cost of producing fuels this way, something nobody has mentioned yet, the regime enlarged this industry throughout the 1930s so that production reached an annual rate of about 2,300,000 tonnes by September 1939.
There wasn't any 'slack' in the domestic oil economy. The only way to increase production was to build more expensive plants producing fuels at a minimum of four times the cost as those from crude oil (and still fall short of even peace time requirements for years to come) or to adopt the easier option of seizing someone else's supply. No prizes for guessing which option the Germans went for.

Cheers

Steve
 
Running out of fuel allowed the Soviets to occupy most of Europe. So high cost or not, I think synthetic fuel was worth every pfennig Germany and other anti communist nations invested in the program.
 
davebender said:
Running out of fuel allowed the Soviets to occupy most of Europe. So high cost or not, I think synthetic fuel was worth every pfennig Germany and other anti communist nations invested in the program.
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Considering Germany couldn't use all the vehicles she made in 1944 because of fuel shortages nor train enough replacements starting in 1942 for the Luftwaffe for the same reason, having less production for more of the basics is pretty critical, because anything above what you can fuel is a waste of resources.
 
because anything above what you can fuel is a waste of resources
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Not really. Shortage of reserves, whether that be manpower shortages, or equipment shortages, is a major reason why campaigns (be they offensive or defensive) ran out puff and fail. It was the major reason for the failures in front of Moscow in 1941, and again in 1942. Having everything in the shop window was something Hitler ardently believed in, and it probably did more to lose his war that any shortages of fuel ever did.
 
Reserves fall into what you can fuel.
 
Of course, and the issues of fuel shortages fall into a number of differing categories. Strategic shortages curtailed German economic activity and curtailed economic activity affected a whole range of war production programs. Synthetic fuel production was too expensive to help that situation.

In terms of battlefield logistics, there were localised shortages from the beginning of the war, but such shortages really began to bite deep from the fall of 1941. In Russia, logistic shortages of all kinds meant the heer, and the LW were unable to keep vehicles operational, Not being able to maintain operational rates affected the force ratios and ultimately this led to defeats of 1941.

But equally important to fuel shortages were the shortages of transport vehicles to replace losses. By early December '41, the state of repair of the Heers vehicle park was parlous, to say the least, and could not be rectified because of a lack or reserves. Cutting back on vehicle production would absolutely have made the situation worse. Fuel was not in short supply, so much as in the wrong place. There was plenty of fuel at the supply heads, but none at the front. The supply heads were several hundred miles behind the lines, at the slowly advancing rail heads. There was sufficient truck transport to get the supplies from the supply heads to the front depots, and this was directly a result of insufficient numbers. German defeat in 1941 had nothing to do with supply shortages in a strategic sense, it had everything to do with an inability to get those supplies where needed. And that was a function of vehicle numbers.
 
The Germans were only able to provide enough fuel to the eastern front 'in a strategic sense' in early 1942 by severely rationing supplies elsewhere in the domestic and non-operational military fields. They had mitigated their lack of fuel by using reserves, which always act as a buffer, in the previous year. In 1941 the reserves had been plundered to support the 3.5+million men, 600,000 vehicles, 3,500 tanks and more than 2,000 aircraft committed to 'Barbarossa'. That is what reserves are for, but the problem for Germany was that once used the reserves could not be replaced. Oil usage followed oil supply to a large extent from late 1941 onwards. It was this that prompted Hitler to tell the senior officers of Army Group South on 1st June 1942 that "if I don't get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, then I must end this war".

5 days after War Directive 35 (for Taifun) was issued on 6th September 1941, Halder estimated the fuel requirements for the front at 27 train loads per day for the rest of September and then 29 per day for all of October. The OKW offered 22 train loads up to 16th of September and then the requested 27 for the rest of that month.

For October it could only supply 22 train loads per day (just over 75% of that required)

For November, when Halder asked for 20 train loads per day, the OKW offered only 3 (15% of that required).

It wasn't just that fuel was in the wrong place.

Cheers

Steve
 
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Oil was a problem for Germany from the first day of the War, but the shortages were of negligible impact on the conduct of her campaigns up to the end of 1941. It did however affect the domestic economy from the very beginning . When Hitler launched the Panzers across the Polish frontier, Germany had stockpiled 15 million tons of fuel. As he did not expect the British and French to declare war, he did not think oil would be a problem. Even when the Allies did declare war, oil was still not an immediate problem. Rather than consuming their stockpile, the Germans actually increased it by seizing the stockpiles of the defeated nations: Denmark and Norway (April 1940) and then the Netherlands, Belgium, and France May 1940). This added added another 5 million tons to the German reserves. This was, however, a one-time bonanza, as these countries imported oil and because of the Royal Navy blockade, further maritime imports were cut off. The NAZI-Soviet alliance which made the War possible, however, added a whole new source of desperately needed oil for the Germans.

The Soviets as part of the NAZI-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact delivered significant quantities of oil to the NAZIs. The arrangement was tht Soviets would deliver grain and raw materials and the Germans manufactured goods desired by the Soviets. As it worked out, the Soviets immediately began delivering large quantities of critically needed raw materials to the Germans. The Germans were to deliver the industrial goods on a longer time frame, but fell behind on even this schedule. The Soviets delivered 4 million tons of oil in 1940 and 1.6 million tons during the first half of 1941. This was just part of the vast quantity of critical materiels the Soviets delivered to the Germans. These deliveries temporarily alleviated one of the most serious problems faced by the Wehrmacht. of course this bonanza ended when Hitler launched the Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). Ironically a rail transport of Soviet tankers was crossing the border at the very moment that the Wehrmacht launched Barbarossa.

Additionally, the major source of oil for the Germans was Romania. The Romanian oill fields, especially Ploesti, was Germany's principal source of oil during the War. German had purchased 2.8 million tons (1938). As part of its foreign policy, Germany steadily increased its influence in Romania. Romania declared its neutrality at the outbreak of World War II. The country was targeted by the Soviet Union as part of its series of Eastern European aggressions. The Soviets seized the provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (1940). This essentially forced Romania into the NAZI camp. German troops were allowed to move into Romania, taking over the rail system (October 1940). Hitler was desperate to prevent Soviet seizure of the oil fields. The Germans began enlarging the oil fields. Romanian shipments to Germany increased to 13 million barrels (1941...about 2.5 million tons). The Germans were, however, no longer paying for the oil in any meaningful way. It was considered part of Romania's contribution to the war effort. Romanian deliveries continued at the 1941 level in both 1942 and 1943. This amounted to about half of Romania's total production, but the Germans wanted more. Here the Romanians were not overly cooperative. The increase in production meant that the fields were being rapidly depleted. In addition the Germans were not paying for the oil and promised deliveries of coal and other items were not arriving. Despite falling production, the effects of bombing, a failing transport system, total mistrust between the germans and the Romanians, Romanian deliveries still totaled 7 million barrels in the first 6 months of 1944. Further American raids hammered Ploesti (late spring and summer of 1944). By this time the Luftwaffe defenses had been largely depleted. When the Red army arrived, the ploesti fields and refineries were left a total wreck.

Ploesti and Synthetic production was just enough to meet German needs, with a pinch and a tuck here and there, and provided the Germans could keep their campaigns to short sharp affairs. They managed to do this until Barbarossa. German oil reserves actually peaked 21 June 1941, though there was never a lavish over supply. Thereafter the vast distances meant the germans spent vast amounts of fuel just to remain supplied and in heavy operations they found consumption rates skyrocketed. An Infantry Division on the western Front in 1940 consumed about 100 tons of oil per day during peak periods of exertion. In the East, with the vastly worse roads, longer distances, massive frontages and sparse disposition of the rail network, the average fuel consumption shot up to 700 tons per day. It was so high, divisional tails.......the truck borne supply echelons of the divisions....could no longer be considered as having sufficient lift capability to keep the divisions fully supplied and on an offensive footing all the time. this was the problem that Halder was referring to in his diary, and it only got worse as time progressed. The overworked truck park rapidly fell apart and broke down, the worsening situation at the front meant that most of the front had to remain inactive and unable to react to Soviet initiatives, it was not longer possible to put into effect large movements of men and material without losing large numbers of both. It was not until the end of the war that the Heer began to receive less than it minimum allocations considered necessary, but they were increasingly unable toi get the fuel where they needed to get it. Admittedly, in order to retain necessary levels of fuel allocations to the army, massive dislocation occurred in terms of other functions such as industry and training, but at the front, at least to the higher echelon distribution points, there was never the shortages that are so often used as an excuse for German defeats. The defeats occurred because of the breakdowns in their logistic system more than anything. I have to disagree with you Im afraid.
 
I'd agree with most of that.

Synthetic oil plants were increased from the 3 I mentioned in 1933 to 14 operating and another 6 under construction by the outbreak of the war, but there was never any realistic way such plants could supply all of Germany's needs (and of course that of her allies, particularly Italy) in peace time, let alone war time.

In 1940 only 2,040,000 tonnes of oil were imported to the Reich, well less than half the figure for 1939. I have a figure of 619,600 tonnes from the USSR. Set this against a domestic peace time (1938 ) consumption of about 7,500,000 tonnes. The Reich received 256,300 tonnes from the USSR in the first part of 1941 but obviously supplies ceased with the German invasion.

Romanian supplies were never going to be enough. In 1941, after Romania had acceded to the Tri-Partite and Anti-Comintern Pacts, hitching its wagon to Nazi Germany's horses, it exported just over 2,000,000 tonnes of oil to the Reich.
Synthetic production was never going to be enough. The only option for the Germans was to capture a significant source in 1941 or at worst 1942. The Germans couldn't operate on a scale in 1942 which even allowed the possibility, and the existing shortage was one of many, many, factors that led to this failure.

Cheers

Steve
 
Those were hydrogenation plants, very, very different beasts from fischer troph synthesis plants. Had investment in extensive development of hydrogenation plants been greatly reduced and plans instead pushed for small, far less costly localized fischer troph synthesis plants, it would have improved many of the logistical fuel supply issues a great deal.

Fischer troph synthesis is less efficient at producing gasoline/kerosene/diesel type hydrocarbons (or light hydrocarbons) than hydrogenation plants, but aside from being far faster and less costly to set-up, they ARE quite efficient at producing a variety of other useful fuels and solvents with methanol the ideal case for pure efficiency, but producing primarily methanol with a lesser (but still significant) portion of other fuels could have filled most or all of the needs from domestic automobiles to transports to aircraft.

A total switch to vehicles and engine designs fully optimized for those alternate fuels would have been the most costly area to invest in, and given the incompatibility between directly switching between gasoline and methanol impractical (you'd at very least need to recalibrate the carburetors for the differing fuel/air mixtures) it would probably have been more practical to aim at fuel blends closer in overall characteristics to normal gasoline. (at least for military vehicles intended to potentially operate on captured foreign fuel resources when needed) For purely domestic cars and trucks, 'unique' fuel standards could be more practical. (the Volkswagon project could have championed engine design optimized around this and potentially used higher compression ratios to take advantage of the high octane ratings of fischer troph synthesis derived fuel blends -be it a standard based on nearly pure methanol with only minor additives, or larger portions or other fuels, though the former seems more likely)



You'd also neither need nor want TEL used in alcohol dominant fuel blends as that tends to worsen octane numbers and may have some other incompatibility issues. I'm not sure if eliminating high volume TEL production would help overall industrial output much, but it shouldn't hurt. (plus, distribution of TEL wouldn't be a limiting factor for usable fuel production/distribution -ie remote small plants could produce everything they needed for most needed fuel blends locally with the possible exception of aviation fuel)



Again, this would be an area fischer troph synthesis plants would actually alleviate the logistical supply-chain issues the Germans had. Plants could be set-up relatively quickly and cheaply near front lines (and along ever-changing boarders during the war) while also being small and easily dispersed and potentially hidden/obscured/disguised. The low set-up cost and time would also make any losses of said plants far less critical or costly to replace.

Fischer troph synthesis plants and hydrogenation plants are pretty much night and day across the board.

Granted, if you want fischer troph plants to put out fuel directly equivalent to conventional military standard gasoline, it's going to be much less efficient than producing predominantly methanol. (fuel blends close enough to gasoline to run as 'drop in' replacements would have under 1/3 the yield of methanol or other mixed output yeilds with similar efficiency to pure methanol synthesis -both in the >60% thermodynamic efficiency range) This is only a real hurdle if said vehicles to be fueled had to be able to easily be fueled by captured gasoline resources in the field. (else, full optimization around domestic synthetic fuels would be practical) Carburetors with rapidly adjustable (or more typically, replaceable) jets would make things more flexibile, or perhaps most realistically: featuring chokes with wide enough control to switch between fairly drastically different mixtures. (maintaining fuel blends with consistent ignition and vaporization characteristics would be much easier than having to have gasoline-type fuel/air mixture ratios)



The only other limiting factor is keeping those remote plants well fueled with feedstocks. German lignite would be the obvious feedstock, but for any plants where shipments of coal would be uneconomical or too risky to rely on, there'd still be plenty of other options. (just about any sort of organic material will do, but wood and agricultural/vegetable waste would be among the more ideal options with dry materials preferable to wet ones -animal waste and byproducts could also be used, even domestic waste, but like vegetable waste would need to be dried first; obviously any waste materials more efficiently used for farming purposes -as fertilizer, hay, etc- would be less ideal options)
 
So you set a plant up nearer the front. Now you have to supply the feedstuffs to the plant rather than fuel directly to the front. I don't see how this can improve a difficult logistical situation unless the feedstuff happens to be both near your new plant and near the front. Building near an active front entails problems of its own. The Germans were always worried about long range attacks on their Romanian sources of oil, a synthetic plant within a couple of hundred miles of a front is going to be very exposed.

Fundamentally there is no way that the Germans could have manufactured the amounts of various fuels (or proposed alternatives) during the war. It is a salient fact that German production of various fuel types peaked in 1940.
The war was not winnable without the capture and exploitation of sources of millions of tonnes of oil outside Germany. This was never achieved and the war was indeed lost. Had Germany accessed sources of 15-20million tonnes of oil per year......

Cheers

Steve
 
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How many tons of coal into the plant equaled how many tons of fuel out?

As far as transporting goes. 1 short ton of coal (2000lbs) has the heating value (BTUs) of 142 gallons of fuel oil. (both vary some depending on exact type/quality of coal and/or oil). Even if the coal has 30,000 BTUs per ton that equals 214 gal.

Transporting several million tons of coal per year to synthetic fuel plants is a logistic problem of it's own. Germany had problems (strain on rail system) caused by trying to supply Italy with coal after Italy was shut off from British coal.
 
I have a figure of 619,600 tonnes from the USSR.
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Actually you are right. ive misread many of the units of measurement from my sources. They should be in barrels. There are roughly 7 barrels to the tonne. My reference to 4 million tonnes should be barrels,, and that equals your figure.

.

It doesnt help much. Necessarily the plant would need to be located near to a rail head, and the shipment of materials needed to run the plant , build the plant would be beyond rail lift capacity in the east. According to Hayward, Germany reached a peak operating capacity in the east of about 70% requirements in the latter part of 1942. That meant most of the frontline forces were immobilised for most of the time and forced onto the defensive to conserve all manner of supply. Soak up some of that lift capacity by decentralising the synthetic oil production, and you are simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But thats not the only problem. Whilst the Germans had issues a plenty with getting supplies of all descriptions to the railheads, they then had the problem of distributing that supply to the front, and this could only be done with truck. With the distances between the sparse railheads to the frontline depots up to 6 or 7 times as great as was the case in western Europe, there just wasnt the lift capacity in the divisional and Corps level truck parks to get the supply distributed to the front line units in near sufficient quantity. Having a depot at an army level supply head (almost always a railhead) isnt going to help the lower orders of the supply chain, and it is here that the real problems existed for germany. They simply did not have the trucks needed to get the supply (of all descriptions) from the army level depots to the front line units.

Horse Drawn units could not do this job very efficiently either, furthermore the horse drawn baggage train for the units was declining in a similar way to the truck park. The To&E for a 1941 Infantry division, @ 15000 combat effectives, was 6500 horses. By 1943, attrition was so bad it was down to about 2000 horses for a 12000 strong To&E. Units could only be moved and supplied en echelon.....basically pooling the horse (and truck pools) to move one unit, then another and another and so on. If units had to be moved quickly, it meant abandoning vast amounts of equipment if the russians atacked on a broad front, as they did 1943-4
 
The war was not winnable without the capture and exploitation of sources of millions of tonnes of oil outside Germany.
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In the East, even if they had captured and held the Caucasus fields, they couldnt use them. A report from the German Ministry of Supply in 1942, forlornly showed that it would not be possible to return any of the oilfields back to meaningful production in less than a year, with 100% of East front rail capacities devoted to getting the necessary materials needed to rebuild the infrastructure and build the pipelines to get the fuel to where it was needed. Maikop had been so comprehensively sabotaged that it took the russians until 1955 to bring its main fields back into service.

Germany simply lacked the transport capabilities to get the oil back to where it could be used. They needed seaborne lift capability, which just wasnt possible
 
parsifal said:
In the East, even if they had captured and held the Caucasus fields, they couldnt use them.
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I agree, that's why I wrote "capture and exploitation" in my original post.

The Germans never stood a chance. The original 'Four Year Plan' called for an increase in production from around 2 million tonnes in 1936 to 4.7 million tonnes in 1940. A substantial part of this increase (from 620,000 to 2,730,000 tonnes) was to be in synthetic fuels from the hydrogenation plants using the recently developed Bergius process.

The four year plan was superceded by the 'Karinhall Plan' which called for an increase in production of finished oil products of 11 million tonnes per year by 1944. It was a completely unrealistic and unattainable target and like its successors, ending in January 1944 with the 'Mineralol Plan', typical of many Nazi regime plans. Writing something into a plan doesn't make it happen! I can think of dozens of production plans from 1933 to 1945 which were never worth the paper they were typed on.

Cheers

Steve
 
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Coal to Liquids is now and has been for a long time competitive with conventional sources outside of two areas: The plant must be large to gain economies of scale, it must have a long life time of around 20 years to amortise that investment, it must be near a coal field to minimise the significant costs of coal transport and that coal field must be large enough to support that long amortisation period.

The above parameters limit choices and increase risk. The ability of oil producers to lower production easily and build cheaper refieneries lowers their risk. They can always ruin a coal to liquids investment by slightly undercutting the costs.

The Germans simply didn't have the time to develop their coal to liquids technology. Ideas that worked such as fluidised bed gasifyers and catalytic reactors, alkylation, improved catalysts and new types the could directly synthesis gasoline were developed but entered service in only a small number of plants.

The kind of technology that became available in the 80s would have given them a chance to build enough plant and make enough oil from a limited coal supply.
 
You aren't limited to using coal feedstocks. Various forms of organic material could be used, though wood and agricultural waste would probably the most universal. (domestic waste and high-yield fuel crops might be useful too, but the former presents more complex processing logistics and the latter would compete with food production unless limited to land less/not suited to food production but useful for some types of fuel crops)

This doesn't solve all problems, but it at least reduces some of them.

Destructive distillation of many of those materials will also yield some useful liquid fuel fractions as well (just as coal will) but the majority would be solids or gases more useful for synthesis. (tar fractions would be best reprocessed to remove useful aromatics and remaining waste -not useful for industrial grade tar use- cycled back into the synthetic fuel plants)

Methanol synthesis would be the most efficient fuel option with over 60% thermodynamic efficiency (I'm not sure what tonnage that amounts to, but it should be more than 60% of a ton for dry brown coal input due to the lower energy density of methanol ... but probably around 1/2 a ton gasoline/kerosene/fuel oil equivalent).


Focusing on synthetic fuels that are relatively cheap and easy to produce that also have potential advantages to conventional petroleum derived hydrocarbon fractions would offer a bit of a different comparison than an apples to apples open-market direct-pretroleum-subsitutute fuel. The problem there is it won't work well on an open market unless there was a massive push for competitive alternative engine designs optimized primarily for non-petroleum fuels. (or rather, not direct distillates -potentially still using petroleum feedstocks among many others, or including a blend of direct distillates and synthetic fuels complying to a common standard range of properties)

Large-scale government intervention (something possible with Germany's planned economy ... had it been managed remotely efficiently) could sidestep that hurtle by mandating development of the new technology (or pushing disincentives for the unnatractive facets of the existing fuel industry), at very least for domestic civil and military use.

This would have been something to very seriously consider during the transition to octane boosted fuels as you'd both avoid any use of TEL and standardize on higher octane fuels with higher compression ratios as standard features. (without the latter, the fuel economy of alcohols -especially methanol- or any high-oxygenate fuel blends is rather poor) With standard gasoline being phased out, you could also take advantage of other properties like reduced or eliminated soot/carbon deposits from incomplete combustion (might still be a problem in blends with high hydrocarbon fractions or high molecular weight alcohols -anything with low molecular oxygen content). And yes, you would need to address corrosion issues and other factors specific to alcohol fuels, but that's much less of a problem if engineering is focused on that as a standard feature rather than tossed in after the fact. (designing flex-fuel engines that worked reasonably well on both normal gasoline and alcohol-heavy synthetic blends would likely be much more troublesome, especially for anything high performance)

It's also really aviation fuel that needs a significantly higher energy density (by volume and weight) than synthetic alcohol fuel blends could offer, and more limited supplies of aviation fuel blends (higher alcohols, ketones, isooctane, and aromatics) should have been reasonable to produce with the available technology as well, but more difficult to produce at just any synthetic fuel plant. (you'd need a supply line of coal/oil derived aromatics to achive high energy density while maintaining high octane rating, short of that you'd likely make do with something with good octane rating but slightly worse than gasoline energy density -likely poorer fuel economy than C2 or C3, possibly competitive with B4 due to the higher compression ratio making up some of the difference; you'd also have to account for the slightly richer mixtures needed for the more oxygen-heavy fuel blends) Destructive distillation of wood and vegetable matter can yield some aromatics, but the yield depends on the type of wood/material and you would need industrial grade charcoal retorts and fractional condensation towers to refine that. (or possibly a hybrid distillation-synthesis reaction chamber cycling though different modes of operation, minimizing waste heat from any sort of batch process, recycling the wood gas directly -as syngas- and using the hot wood char left in the chamber as syngas feedstock directly) Even so, such distillation apparatus might lack the ability to separate out most of the useful aromatic fractions from the wood tar, and additional processing may have been needed. (additional distillation passes/stages)

Similar destructive distillation cycles would make sense to include on primarily coal fired synthetic fuel plants as well. (rather than oxidizing all those useful distillation products into syngas, separate them out as part of the processing cycle of the reaction chambers -this would be more complicated in a continuous reaction arrangement rather than a cycle based one though)






Hydrogenation plant derived synthetic fuels would have far fewer advantages over petroleum and a greater fraction of LPG fractions and methane not so useful for general purpose fuel. (unless fischer tropsch plants were set-up alongside hydrogenation plants to recycle the 'waste' gases by converting them to syngas and then to methanol or other liquids)

A gas-to-liquids program might have worked in Italy too, but their natural gas production was too low in the pre-war and wartime period. (so unless they could massively increase drilling efforts -and needed technology for that- sooner, natural gas derived fuels wouldn't be so useful there either) I don't think Italy's wood or agriculture resources would be enough to make biomass to liquid fuel options attractive either. (same would go for any sort of fermentation based alcohol fuel production system, which would tend to be less efficient than fischer tropsch synthesis anyway unless biomass waste was recycled in synthetic fuel plants alongside ethanol fermentation plants)


Any one engineering solution with 1930s technology may not have been workable (no direct synthetic gasoline substitute), but a combination of solutions using technology of the day applied in an efficient, logical manner, might have. (all my comments on the fischer tropsch are based on the processes aimed at production of methanol or the alternate catalysts used for butanol and isooctane production -along with potentially useful biproducts) Honestly, optimzing plants around isooctane production and tapping off intermediate and byproducts as needed might have been the most efficient option with pure menthanol plants used on a more limited basis for high purity grades of that as a chemical feedstock rather than fuel. (I believe methanol produced as an intermediate byproduct of butanol synthesis -a stage of isooctane synthesis- achieved similar thermal efficiency to pure methanol synthesis but resulted in an impure product not useful for technical or lab grade industrial use but very useful as a fuel feedstock -rather than recycling it with syngas into another pass of the butanol process which would require that much more energy input compared to using the methanol directly) That way, a single plant could vary its output of a number of different fuel-grade chemicals and a few technical grade ones (isooctane produced in this method would be of high purity, I believe).
 
The Germans did invest heavily in the then new synthetic fuel technologies available to them. They did not start from scratch, designing different engines or adapting existing engines for different fuel types for what I think are blindingly obvious reasons. They never produced close to quantities of fuels required in this way. For all fuels the figure would be less than 10% (off the top of my head).

This is a dead end, the only viable option for Germany was to capture and exploit one or several substantial sources of oil outside Germany, and they knew it. There were no miracle solutions. The only miracle is that having failed to secure an oil supply they managed to continue the war for as long as they did.

Cheers

Steve
 
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