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The brute force method
At the end of the 1930s, 90 percent of Germany’s energy came from coal and only about 5 percent from oil. Germany had only tiny oil fields in the northern part of the country.
But an endless stream of fossil fuel would be needed to power the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Germany.
Hitler wasn’t worried. Coal and oil aren’t that different — coal is carbon with a little hydrogen and oil is carbon with lots of hydrogen — and Germany was a world leader in chemistry.
In fact, German chemists had invented two processes to transmute coal to oil before the war, and once the Nazis came to power, they rushed to build synthetic oil plants (as well as to overrun countries that had their own oil fields.)
One method, called hydrogenation, was to add large amounts of hydrogen to coal under high temperatures and pressures in the presence of a catalyst. Most of Germany’s aviation fuel was produced this way.
A second method, called the Fischer-Tropsch process, involved heating syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, in the presence of a catalyst to make synthetic oil.
By 1943, fully half of German oil supplies were coming out of the factories.
Both processes were inefficient and dirty, using much more energy than the fuel they made would yield and releasing more, not less, carbon dioxide.
Only the skewed priorities of the war made them attractive.
The story of synthetic fuel challenges the idea that there is no alternative to the 30,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide being released each year.
The photo above, from the 456th Bomb Group Association, shows the Ploiesti synthetic fuel complex in Romania after an Allied air raid.