I remember the rather bad 1970’s George C.Scott movie (“The Formula”) which implied that the Germans developed an advanced process for synthesizing gasoline, fuel oil, etc. I also recall (late 1970’s), that the government had declassified most of the German documents seized, and were actually discarding them…they were given to whoever wanted them.
Now, the conspiracists who claim that “Big Oil” is conspiring to keep this technology off the market loves these kind of myths-it demonizes the oil companies, and feeds their paranoia as well.
As far as I know, the Germans had two main synthesis processes (Lurgi and Fischer-Tropsch)…these were invented in the 1920’s. Obviously, they were refined quite a bit prior to and during the war, but neither process could come close to delivering the fuel the Germans needed. So did they make any significant breakthroughs with this?
I don’t think the Fischer-Tropsch or Bergius processes were secret prior to the war. There’s another American process (Karrick) that does much the same thing as well.
All the Germans ever did was implement them on a large scale. It wasn’t efficient, but if you need gasoline, and all you have is coal, then it’s better than nothing.
They’re still inefficient enough to make regular oil more economical, even with today’s oil prices. The wikipedia articles make it sound like big oil crushed them, but I can’t really believe that in this day and age.
The new hotness though, is using the F-T process to perform Gas-to-Liquid conversion. In other words, take natural gas and convert it into gasoline, jet fuel, lubricating oil, etc… I think there are actually GTL base-stock motor oils available in the US, although they’re mostly for pricey European spec cars.