# Nazi fuel??? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 15, 2012, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904 "2012-02-15T05:14:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Pablo\_O\_Malley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f19dbf/32.png) [@Pablo\_O\_Malley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pablo_O_Malley)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/1 "2012-02-15T05:14:45Z")
towards the end of world war 2, the nazis were working on and were close to completion of a synthetic fuel they never got to complete the project because the war ended and they lost but considering all the success the nazis had in inventing other war technologies, such as the rocket and other weapons, why hasn’t anyone picked up on their synfuel work and tried to complete it? or is it just too distasteful, if it does work, to have a nazi-inspired fuel? why should it? all the rocket technology used to get to the moon was inspired in part by werner von braun’s work, a key nazi scientist during the war ---
**Author:** ![Rhythmdvl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/85f322/32.png) [@Rhythmdvl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rhythmdvl)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/2 "2012-02-15T05:23:10Z")
It was almost perfected, but it was soon supplanted by a combination of small tablets added to plain water, a modified carburetor and the Time Cube. Once the vast improvements in gas mileage made evident by those technologies (non Nazi, BTW) though, the oil companies bought the patents and never produced a commercial product. You can look the patents up online and possibly reproduce their effects, but the corporations colluded to change enough terminology and titles to make them hard/impossible to find yet enforceable if anyone markets similar technology. I suggest you look up the turbo entabulator as a start. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/3 "2012-02-15T05:25:08Z")
synthetic petrol or diesel is made from coal or natural gas and it’s very inefficient if you have access to other ways of making these from crude oil. > **[Synthetic fuel | History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History)** > > The process of direct conversion of coal to synthetic fuel originally developed in Germany. > Friedrich Bergius developed the Bergius process, which received a patent in 1913. Karl Goldschmidt invited Bergius to build an industrial plant at his factory, the Th. Goldschmidt AG (part of > Evonik Industries from 2007), in 1914. Production began in 1919.\[citation needed\] > Indirect coal conversion (where coal is gasified and then converted to synthetic fuels) was also developed in Germany - by Franz Fisc... South Africa used something similar during Apartheid when they had sanctions against them. For any country with other options it’s not economical (yet). ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/4 "2012-02-15T05:29:18Z")
> [@Pablo\_O\_Malley](#): > > towards the end of world war 2, the nazis were working on and were close to completion of a synthetic fuel > > they never got to complete the project because the war ended and they lost You’ve got this wrong. The Germans used synthetic fuel throughout the war, and had been making it since 1927. Pdf file on it [here](http://www.caer.uky.edu/energeia/PDF/vol12_5.pdf). > [@](#): > > or is it just too distasteful, if it does work, to have a nazi-inspired fuel? why should it? It doesn’t have anything to do with it being a German invention, from the linked pdf file: > [@](#): > > But neither coal-to-oil conversion process could produce a synthetic liquid fuel at a cost competitive with natural petroleum. Coal hydrogenation and the F-T synthesis persevered and survived because they provided the only path Germany could follow in its search for petroleum independence. Germany didn’t have enough fuel under it’s control to meet its needs during the war, so synthetic fuel was used because it was the only option to try to make up the shortfall. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/5 "2012-02-15T05:32:47Z")
As Rhythmdvl’s (sarcastic) post indicates, there’s a lot of woo nonsense on the internet about supposed Nazi fuels. However, the Germans were actually making alternative fuels in WWII. They converted a lot of cars and trucks to run on 'wood gas". Here is a picture of a VW Type 82 that was converted to run on wood gas during the war: [http://www.seriouswheels.com/1940-1949/1944-VW-Type-82-Wood-Gas-Generator.htm](http://www.seriouswheels.com/1940-1949/1944-VW-Type-82-Wood-Gas-Generator.htm) It works, but it’s not very efficient, and so far the only practical use for it has ever been to use as a fuel when you can’t find anything else to use. Another example was the “cuckoo project” which converted coal to a liquid fuel. There has been a lot of research into methods of making gasoline replacements from coal. Currently they are all too expensive to be practical, but research on it continues to this day. ---
**Author:** ![Pablo\_O\_Malley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f19dbf/32.png) [@Pablo\_O\_Malley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pablo_O_Malley)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/6 "2012-02-15T05:36:51Z")
if the u.s. developed a synfuel that cost twice the price of gas it would still be cheaper to use for all of us…because we’d no longer have to import oil we wouldn’t have to spend billions defending saudi arabia and we wouldn’t care as much about the middle east…if we had synfuel twenty years ago we wouldn’t have had gulf war one…iraq’s got all the oil? who cares, we dont use it, we got a synfuel…and most of our allies would also ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/7 "2012-02-15T05:41:34Z")
Since we can convert to synfuels overnight and nobody minds paying twice as much for gasoline, nor does the higher price have any effect on our economy, I don’t see why we haven’t done this already. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/8 "2012-02-15T05:48:56Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Since we can convert to synfuels overnight and nobody minds paying twice as much for gasoline, nor does the higher price have any effect on our economy, I don’t see why we haven’t done this already. It’s a valid question to ask if it would be cheaper for the government to subsidise the cost of synethetic fuels from coal in order to make them the same as crude oil than to pay the costs of foreign wars. The total cost of Iraq/Afghanistan was 2.4 trillion up to 2017 say thats over 15 years. Total US oil consumption is 19.5 million barrels per day. Anyone want to do the math and work it out? ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/9 "2012-02-15T05:58:40Z")
Actually I’ll take a crack at it: works out to be 8 billion barrels a year consumption at current price of $101 a barrel = $808 billion a year the US spends on oil for all needs. If the government spent an equal amount to subsidise synthetic fuel (halving the price) that would cost 1.2 Trillion over 15 years. So yeah actually thats kind of feasible, assuming oil from coal is not more than double $101 a barrel to produce. The US apparently has coal reserves to last more than 300 years, the main issue would be how quickly you could build coal/oil plants and increase coal output, but over 15 years it should be doable. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/10 "2012-02-15T06:19:29Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > Actually I’ll take a crack at it: > > works out to be 8 billion barrels a year consumption at current price of $101 a barrel = $808 billion a year the US spends on oil for all needs. > If the government spent an equal amount to subsidise synthetic fuel (halving the price) that would cost 1.2 Trillion over 15 years. So yeah actually thats kind of feasible, assuming oil from coal is not more than double $101 a barrel to produce. > > The US apparently has coal reserves to last more than 300 years, the main issue would be how quickly you could build coal/oil plants and increase coal output, but over 15 years it should be doable. I’ll just say that if it were that simple we would have large plants being built right now. There are a lot of economic factors involved. I think it’s a great idea long term, but it will be a slow and bumpy ride getting there. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/11 "2012-02-15T06:53:38Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I’ll just say that if it were that simple we would have large plants being built right now. There are a lot of economic factors involved. I think it’s a great idea long term, but it will be a slow and bumpy ride getting there. Mainly political factors as I see it. A US presidential candidate proposing a massive outlay on subsidising alternative energies couldn’t get elected because subsidies are one of the evils of big government and he’d be called an evil socialist. Yet the massive defense budgets are never seen by the US public as exactly what they are, effectively subsidies to defense industries. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/12 "2012-02-15T07:20:28Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > Mainly political factors as I see it. A US presidential candidate proposing a massive outlay on subsidising alternative energies couldn’t get elected because subsidies are one of the evils of big government and he’d be called an evil socialist. > > Yet the massive defense budgets are never seen by the US public as exactly what they are, effectively subsidies to defense industries. There are economic problems. It takes time to build these plants, and in that time the price of oil will rise rapidly anticipating a reduced demand. That may make the synfuel price more attractive, but it will be an economic burden affecting the cost of everything. It would also require a massive infrastructure improvement to haul that much coal to processing plants. If it could be done from natural gas those costs wouldn’t be so high. And then yes, the political problems are daunting. Environmental advocates, oil interests, auto manufacturers, and the regular sausage factory. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/13 "2012-02-15T07:28:38Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > There are economic problems. It takes time to build these plants, and in that time the price of oil will rise rapidly anticipating a reduced demand. So your saying effectively OPEC nations are blackmailing the US? Don’t make massive investments in alternative energy or we’ll jack the price of oil up and screw your economy? Otherwise, reduced demand would lead to a drop in price. > [@TriPolar](#): > > . It would also require a massive infrastructure improvement to haul that much coal to processing plants. If you build the plants close to coal mines, then you just use the existing oil transportation infrastructure. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/14 "2012-02-15T07:34:59Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > So your saying effectively OPEC nations are blackmailing the US? Don’t make massive investments in alternative energy or we’ll jack the price of oil up and screw your economy? Otherwise, reduced demand would lead to a drop in price. They seem to have done it before. They don’t come out and say that’s the reason. And remember that the demand doesn’t reduce until the plants are complete. It continues to increase all along the way, assuming economic collapse doesn’t occur. > [@](#): > > If you build the plants close to coal mines, then you just use the existing oil transportation infrastructure. That might work. I don’t know how concentrated the coal deposits are. I’ll add this as a self reminder, I think we need a massive infrastructure investment in electricity delivery to improve the feasibility of non-oil based electricity production. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/15 "2012-02-15T07:43:57Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > They seem to have done it before. They don’t come out and say that’s the reason. And remember that the demand doesn’t reduce until the plants are complete > > That might work. I don’t know how concentrated the coal deposits are. As I understand it coal/oil plants can be fairly small. It would be feasible to build one at every coal mine head, which already has to have massive infrastructure for loading coal trains at the moment anyway. And thats nonsense about demand not decreasing until the plants are complete, you obviously don’t try and switch overnight, you build coal/oil conversion plants over 15 years and every single one that comes online lowers demand for crude oil by some small amount. Also remember oil is fungible, OPEC can’t artificially raise the price of oil only to the US as punishment, because we’d just buy it off another third party that bought if from them if they tried to do that. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/16 "2012-02-15T07:55:14Z")
> [@Pablo\_O\_Malley](#): > > if the u.s. developed a synfuel that cost twice the price of gas it would still be cheaper to use for all of us…because we’d no longer have to import oil we wouldn’t have to spend billions defending saudi arabia and we wouldn’t care as much about the middle east…if we had synfuel twenty years ago we wouldn’t have had gulf war one…iraq’s got all the oil? who cares, we dont use it, we got a synfuel…and most of our allies would also Couldn’t we conserve that amount of energy, if everyone just ignored the normal rules and didn’t waste pixels on capitalization & punctuation? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/17 "2012-02-15T07:59:31Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > Also remember oil is fungible, OPEC can’t artificially raise the price of oil only to the US as punishment, because we’d just buy it off another third party that bought if from them if they tried to do that. They can do whatever they want, and it’s usually to their advantage to increase the price. Worldwide demand doesn’t diminish until you have a lot of plants built, in the mean time the middle eastern oil producing countries which are totally dependent on oil profits will continue to raise prices until demand falls off. At that point they could reduce the price to spur demand and make the synfuel uneconomical. Then you have to factor in the international politics as well. But I think we agree that politics is a serious hindrance. ETA: I think we already have a situation where China is getting favorable prices from Iran. I don’t think China is going to sell us any of that oil. ---
**Author:** ![tellyworth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/977dab/32.png) [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 8:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/18 "2012-02-15T08:12:49Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > The total cost of Iraq/Afghanistan was 2.4 trillion up to 2017 say thats over 15 years. Total US oil consumption is 19.5 million barrels per day. Anyone want to do the math and work it out? Roughly half of that is imported. About 5% of the total comes from Iraq, 0% from Afghanistan. cite (ftp), I summed crude and petroleum. ---
**Author:** ![kombatminipig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b5ac83/32.png) [@kombatminipig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kombatminipig)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 8:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/19 "2012-02-15T08:21:52Z")
> [@Pablo\_O\_Malley](#): > > o have a nazi-inspired fuel? why should it? all the rocket technology used to get to the moon was inspired in part by werner von braun’s work, a key nazi scientist during the war Good god no, science is science. Most data on the human body’s reaction to exposure still used today was collected from experiments on Jews in the concentration camps. As distastefully as it was collected, it’s still data. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2012, 8:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904/20 "2012-02-15T08:37:58Z")
I’m not quite sure it’s happening at all in this thread, but discussions of this sort are often driven partly by a misunderstanding of what ‘synthetic’ means in this context. It’s all too easy for the man in the street to imagine that ‘synthetic fuel’ is manufactured by some sort of Willy Wonka type process where vats of cheap ingredients are mixed to produce some saleable product. In practice - this is all about energy - and you don’t get anything for nothing -worst case: to convert water and air into fuel, you have to add more energy than you’ll ever get back from burning the resulting fuel. Converting coal into liquid fuel, it’s a bit easier, because it’s already halfway there (and you can consume some other coal to power the conversion process), but you still need to expend a lot of energy doing the conversion - and it might work out to be a better deal if you just burn the coal to make electricity, whilst shutting down some oil-burning power stations to conserve oil. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nazi-fuel/612904.md?page=2)