How the Nazis Created Synthetic Oil During WWII

Why Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas Are NOT Fossil Fuels.

Excerpt from The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change

During the early 1930s, the Luftwaffe, Germany’s military air force, contracted with German industrial giant IG Farben to produce a synthetic high-quality aviation fuel. Germany’s military arm, the Wehrmacht, followed suit by hiring IG Farben to produce synthetic diesel fuel. By 1936, IG Farben was no longer an independent company, but a government-private enterprise partnership run by the Nazi government. When Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany had fourteen synthetic fuel plants in operation and six more under construction, producing approximately 95 percent of the aviation fuel used by the Luftwaffe. By 1943, using synthetic oil production defined by the Fischer-Tropsch process, Germany had almost three million metric tons of gasoline by hydrogenation of coal. Adding to this diesel fuel, aviation fuel, and various lubricants produced synthetically from coal, Nazi Germany was able to satisfy up to 75 percent of its fuel demand through coal conversion processes made possible by the equations developed in the Fischer-Tropsch process.[1]

At temperatures above 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, we found that the carbon in calcite formed carbon dioxide rather than methane. This implies that methane in the interior of Earth might exist at depths between 100 and 200 kilometers. This has broad implications for the hydrocarbon reserves of our planet and could indicate that methane is more prevalent in the mantle than previously thought. Due to the vast size of Earth’s mantle, hydrocarbon reserves in the mantle could be much larger than reserves currently found in Earth’s crust.

• Source: Quoted in: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “Methane in deep earth: A possible new source of energy,” llnl.gov , press release, September 13, 2004, at https://www.llnl.gov/news/methane-deep-earth-possible-new-source-energy.

Also constrained by lacking extensive national petroleum reserves, imperial Japan followed Nazi Germany into synthetic fuel production. In 1936, Japan calculated that the nation would have had a 400-to-500-year fuel reserve by converting coal to liquid fuel. Japan’s seven-year plan of 1937 called for the construction of eighty-seven synthetic fuel plants by 1944, all of them using the Fischer-Tropsch process. The imperial Japanese government set a goal of producing 6.3 million barrels annually of synthetic gasoline and the same quantity of synthetic diesel fuel. While the economic demands of waging war in China and across the Pacific ultimately thwarted Japan’s ambitions to produce synthetic oil, Japan still managed to construct fifteen synthetic fuel plants that reached peak production of 717,000 barrels of synthetic fuel in 1944.[1]

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[1] Paul Schubert, Steve LeViness, and Kym Arcuri, Syntroleum Corporation, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Anthony Stranges, Texas A&M University, “Fischer-Tropsch Process and Product Development During World War II,” April 2, 2011, unpublished paper, at Fischer-Tropsch.org, under “Primary Documents/Presentations.”

Another measure of oil’s economic value involves the United States and the Allies’ bombing over Germany during World War II. On November 3, 1944, well before the end of the war, President Roosevelt issued a directive calling for a government study to determine whether or not all the bombings served any purpose.[2] What precisely did the dropping over 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe accomplish?

The resulting United States Strategic Bombing Study produced some surprising results. The bombing attack on the German airplane industry culminated in the last week of February 1944, when the U.S. dropped 3,636 tons of bombs on German airframe plants. In that week and the days following, the U.S. and the Allies bombed every known aircraft factory in Germany. But, surprisingly, in 1944, the Nazis manufactured a total of 39,807 aircraft of all kinds. The number in 1942 before the bombing attacks began had only been 15,596. The German aircraft production had increased despite the massive bombing of Nazi aircraft plants.

As the U.S. and the Allies destroyed Germany’s aircraft manufacturing plants, the Germans adapted to recover the machinery and disperse the manufacturing. Why? The bombing devastated the buildings, but the machines “showed remarkable durability.” The Germans reorganized the management of the aircraft plants and subdivided production into many small units that were immune to massive bombing raids. The result was clear—bombing the plants had not slowed down the Nazis’ ability to make new airplanes. The Allied bombing of German oil and chemical production plants told a similar story. By the end of the war, the Germans could produce Messerschmitt fighter planes, but they had no airplane fuel with which to fly them. The output of aviation gasoline from synthetic plants fell from 316,000 tons per month, when the air attacks began in 1943, to 5,000 tons in September 1944, when the U.S. and the Allies had bombed every primary airplane manufacturing plant. Without fuel, the Nazi war machine came to a grinding halt.

In his 2021 book Stalin’s War, Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin noted that in the early stages of World War II, the British and French developed a plan for waging war on the Soviet Union.[3] On January 4, 1940, the British war cabinet discussed bombing the Baku oil fields. The British knew that three-quarters of Russia’s petroleum production came from the Baku oil fields in Azerbaijan, then a part of the Soviet Caucasus. On March 28, 1940, at a Supreme War Council in Paris, the British and French formalized their plans for bombing Soviet oil installations in Baku, later code-named Operation Pike. On April 1, 1940, the British Air Ministry ordered four squadrons of Bristol Blenheim Mk IV bombers, a total of forty-eight bombers, to redeploy and reinforce Britain’s Middle East command in Iraq. The British Air Ministry acted after a military reconnaissance flight over the Baku oil fields reported the wooden oil derricks along the Caspian Sea were only seventy yards apart. The ministry realized “incendiary bombs could easily ignite a conflagration of the entire petroleum-saturated area.”[4] The bombing raid never happened. Still, McMeekin allowed himself an exercise in hypothetical history. He mused that a British air attack on the Baku oil fields could have created “an alternative world in which the war machines of Stalin and Hitler might have slowly ground to a halt for the lack of oil in the weeks after May 15, 1940.”[5]

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[1] Paul Schubert, Steve LeViness, and Kym Arcuri, Syntroleum Corporation, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Anthony Stranges, Texas A&M University, “Fischer-Tropsch Process and Product Development During World War II,” April 2, 2011, unpublished paper, at Fischer-Tropsch.org, under “Primary Documents/Presentations.”

[2] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The European War report was the first completed, published by the Government Printing Office on September 30, 1945. This report as originally issued can be read on the Internet at the following URL: http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#page1.

[3] Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 134 and 153-155.

[4] Ibid., p. 154.

[5] Ibid., p. 155.

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[1] Cecil G. Lalicker, Principles of Geology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949), pp. 59-60.

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[1] “The German Document Retrieval Project,” Center for Energy & Mineral Resources,” Texas A&M University, September 20, 1977.