Synthetic refineries got nerfed with the 1941 update. And the developers forgot to put coal as a resource so they're completely broken. Worst Germany war ever! Will not replay scenario.
The really crazy thing is that the entire axis shortfall of ten million tonnes a year translates to ~182,000 barrels a day. Germany's oil consumption today is about 2.3 million barrels a day, in peacetime. Shows how oil dependant our modern socities have become.
We have spent the last half century pulling oil out of the ground and turning it into lots of people, basically. I read an interesting paper awhile back - quite exhaustive and with numerous citations - explaining all the oil that went into everything in our civilization. ....and how it is not replaceable and how other things are not scalable. (a "substitute" exists, but by its mere existence it does not magically bless oil dependency away, because it cannot be SCALED UP to any meaningful degree ..and in the final analysis usually turns out to exist only due to the existence of the broader oil economy) Anyone talking about ending use of oil and coal is talking about genocide on a never before seen scale. Great Leap Forward and Holodomor killed tens of millions. This would kill billions. And our response is to hang lapel pins of virtue on ourselves that are evocative of, symbolic of, having a solution, and the moral symbol shall bless and save us, presumably. When someone preaches that we should just mindlessly flip the off switch, I say you first, you first. Climbing down gracefully and intelligently from the teetering peak we have reached would be the greatest civilizational achievement ever. If we think we don't have to, there are many thousands of nuclear fuel rods waiting to call our bluff and cook off into the atmosphere if we do it in any other way. When the Romans collapsed, it was just a matter of swamps and malaria coming back while some aqueducts fell apart.
Honestly, I think it worked the other way around. They still did not understand how crucial and war ending a lack of oil is. So after LEARNING their mistakes, they NOW have 2,3 million. And still, that's actually not an insane amount of oil, Americans have 30 million in reserve. The German Military used most of their oil on the approach to The Soviets.. and ran out of 'enough oil to maintain an army'. By the time Germans reached the Vulga they had been using horses, not oil, and then eating or losing the horses grazing areas. So, who still thinks the Germans were an "Elite" force? No one. They sucked as an army, didn't understand modern warfare, and we're utterly destroyed by 17 year old Antifa like communist. I would be embarrassed to lose to the Soviets. Especially because, in the east, Germans had more men than the Soviets. And still lost.
@@joebobhenrybob2000 just imagine poor Israel, surrounded by enemies and yet chose the coastline of the Mediterranean instead of going inland and milking the teets of middle eastern oil.🛢️ That is how little we knew of the quantity we would end up using over time.
Hitler refused to let Manstein have any water as he insisted that Manstein subsist only on yaks milk. Thus, plainly, it was Hitler's fault and Manstein could have done it if mad man Hitler had let him. Praise be to Manstein.
Manstein turning water into oil? Whoahahahahahaha! :D He should have been sent to a polytechnical university instead of the Kriegsacademie instead. I can imagine Manstein in charge of a major conglomerate like the I.G. Farben or Bayers instead of Army Group South. In this hypothetical case, I wonder how Manstein the CEO would have affected World War.
Der heilige Mannstein hätte auch einfach aus dem Nichts Öl materialisieren können... (wenn es ihm der böse Adi nicht verboten hätte und darauf bestanden hätte dass er für seine Sünden leidet)
Germany in WWI had also lost over 16 million horses and horsepower had replaced horses by WWII, so even they were not in great supply. Much of their transport and field kitchens relied on horses, and only the US could field entire mechanized Divisions.
Not to mention, motorized units are no better off than foot-mobile units in places with poor road network surrounded by a plenty of mud. This was the case with the Soviet union during its spring and autumn seasons. However, the Ardennes operation also encountered a similarly horrible ground condition which played a big part in completely throwing off the German timetable. This operation required that 6th Panzer Army cross Meuse River by no later than the 18th or the 19th of December 1944, barely 3 days after the beginning of this operation. Because of the mud, panzer divisions lacked cross-country capability and were confined to roads and towns. Not surprisingly, this also led to very nasty traffic congestion.
The production of synthetic oil requires massive inputs of other forms of energy, primarily electricity. Germany had two major sources of electricity: hydroelectric and steam turbine (basically, coal-burning). Hydroelectric is pretty cheap once the costs of the infrastructure (dams) are covered, but it's not available everywhere. Otherwise Germany was burning coal to convert other coal into a more mobile form of fuel. The massive inefficiency is obvious.
Apartheid South Africa was blockaded. They could get no oil. Sasol project turned coal to oil. S Africa had plenty coal. S African guerilla's tried to blow it up Sasol. Economy goes to the wall when neccesity rheigns!
@The Colonel People forget that WW1 was only 20 years past. The rear of the German and Red Armies depended on horses, even some Camels made it to Berlin.
Yes indeed, however the bombing of the Polesti oil production facilities (in Romania) & synthetic oil manufacturing elsewhere proved to be extremely costly for the 8th Air Force & R.A.F., so these raids could not be carried-out on a rwgular basis. Furthermore, I recall reading that repairs to these industries were carried out quickly & production eventually returned to normal. So, I wonder if the Allied bombing campaign significantly worsened Germany's oil crisis in 1943 and/or 1944... 🤔
Hitting the pinch points in production, like ball bearings, looks to have produced better results. Although killing off your experienced pilots and tank crews wasn’t a good path to sustainability.
Rockwell - OK, if by that you mean Germany collapsed back onto its supply lines, conjoined with the losses accrued to its mechanized forces in the field.
They had the trains to take supplies to the depots, but were limited on the trucks and the fuel for the trucks to take the supplies from the depots to the front lines, and relied on horse. Logistical nightmare indeed.
in his book "Achtung Panzer " written in 1937 , toward the end of the book , Guderian write than his doubts on the available supply of oil and rubber had been dispelled by learning of the ongoing progress in synthetic production of oil and buna rubber , it was in fact grossly optimistic
Also, the Jumo jet engines required about one fifth the labor and money to construct as compared to the late war German piston engines, so it was a win-win. The lack of high grade alloys meant short lifespans for the Jumo engines.
@@amerigo88 RELATIVELY short lifespans. We're talking about 25 hour *maintenance periods,* not full lifespan of the engine. It was the time when engine would be fully dissassembled and checked. So it was normal for engine to survive 2 such periods ie 50 hours or even 3 ie 75 hours. Meanwhile late war prop engines of Allies driven to their limit already had a lifespan of _only 100 hours._ So "unreliable" jet engine built without required materials could match to a half or more of lifespan of much more expensive prop engine.
They had to run on low octane fuel, they didn't choose to. For example the ~35l V12 DB605 engine with methanol-water injection from a late war BF-109 produced up to 2000hp with 87 octane fuel compared to the 27l V12 Merlin from a late war P-51 that could reach about the same ~2000hp useing 100 octane fuel. Postwar Merlins where equipped with the same MW injection system for racing and reached up to 3800hp!
@@hernerweisenberg7052 plus ideally you don’t want methanol or ethanol running in plane parts due the the fact both encourage water to get in the fuel and that’s gonna add to maintenance issues. Hell in peace time it would be an outright safety issue.
A pfennig was a German penny, worth 100 pf per mark, and during about '40-'45, they produced the Riechsmark and were also 100 pf per r.m. All replaced by the euro in about 2002, I think.
It is much more complicated, there had been a lot of consequent and even parallel currencies in Germany's history. Reichsmark (which replaced Rentenmark in 1924 which replaced Mark after 1923 hyperinflation) was replaced by TWO Deutsche Mark currencies in 1948 (sparkling the first Berlin crisis). In 1991 the East German Mark was abandoned for the West German Deutsche Mark, which was replaced by the Euro eventually.
Be kind to TIK, he probably spends so long in the past he hasn't caught up with decimalisation and must still think we have 20 shillings, ie 240d (pennies), in the pound ;-)
Here is some interesting data just for comparison. If we take a rough conversion of the German Mark to American Dollars (of about 2.5M=$1) we will find that the synthetic gasoline cost about 9.2¢ to produce while at the same time consumers were paying, in the US, about 4.22¢ per liter for oil derived gasoline.
How would you transport the heat to a haber-borsh reactor? Its not likeyou can just transport it with a couple of copper pipes and some hogh boiling point oil.
@@theterribleanimator1793 There are lots of ways. It could be directly in the chamber, like a cauldron, or it could use the heated fluids like geothermal reactors do. These would be dual-purpose/integrated processes, rather than taking place in separate facilities.
Not only is NP low emission, but has the potential to be much cheaper than oil. It's the free market solution, but regulations are preventing progress!
My grandfather was a chemist who developed this synthetic fuel in WW2. We never had an in depth conversation about it before he died but as I recall he said it was predominantly for V-2 rocket use.
Coal was probably the shortest reason of Germany's ability to continue to war.Germany had vast amounts of hard coal in Silesia and brown coal in Ruhr.Greater Germany including Austria,Czechoslovakia,Alsace Lorraine and some territories of Poland had an amounts of some 500 million tons of coal output per year which was almost on par with USA's volume of production and vastly more than other countries.
That directly used oil for producing tanks and airplanes and ships and the "production stops after 20 resource dificit" rule still applied, so not having oil was still pretty bad.
Thank you tik for talking about the economics factors of ww2 most historians have no clue about Economics and your prospective adds a lot to the field of history.
Man, that would be a interesting scenario for a ucronia. Lybian oil is known to be of high quality, with very low sulfur residues, so it require less refining (this is the short version, it's probably more complicated than this). Fortunately, in our timeline, it was discovered only after the war...
Well, good for the allies! They just got more oil to win the war! Why not the axis? You say? Well, the transport of that oil field to the German mainland would have been nigh impossible do in major part to a increasingly heavy British blockade of German-Italian units in Africa... The allies would have then realized, due to their amazing spy-rings...that the oil there existed and then exploit the oil and ship it to the Soviet Union to continue to speed up the victory.
That would be a Game changer for Axis...Hitler would've simply conquered Spain & Gibraltar with only 10% of Manpower from Operation Barbarossa...RN/RAF would've Evacuated Medeterian...Rommels Win Africa with unlimited supplies....Barbarossa would've won with More Panzer divisions and unlimited fuel Supplies
If you read the Oil book "The Prize" then you see that oil prices in the 1930's collapsed also because of the discovery of the Texas Permian basin, a huge reservoir of oil that was so prolific it meant the Texas Railroad Commission stepped in. This had a global impact even though VLCC tankers hadn't yet been built.
Thanks. When I heard of synthetic oil I always thought of it going through a lab type process, you know, like in a clean scientific place with beakers, Bunsen burners and the like. Thanks for making the process known, because I had enough trouble reading my Dad's doctoral thesis let alone anyone else's.
This is one of the main reasons why I think now 1942 worse than 1941. Once, when i have seen statistics of the fuel balance of the USSR first time, I also began to realize the danger of the situation in the summer of 1942. Moreover, it’s not necessary for the Germans to take Baku, it’s enough to hold on and then assemble an air force to attack this oil fields - the Germans were very effectively durin air raids on GAZ plant in series of raids (1943), therefore, from attacks on for stationary, flammable and poorly covered by air defense targets similar effectiveness can be expected. I'm glad that such an idea will reach the English-speaking audience. Thanks.
Any discussion of this subject without detailing the involvement of Standard Oil, General Motors, Ethyl Gasoline Corporation ( a joint Standard Oil / GM company) and Dupont, will leave a giant hole in the story. Without the help / involvement of the previously mentioned company's, German production of synthetic fuel, especially for aviation fuel, would have rendered that synthetic fuel practically unusable for military use.
Sure, aaaaaand it was also those corporations that were in large part responsible for the drop in natural oil fuel prices that made that synthetic production impracticable in terms of foreign trade. Would like to point out though that investing tax money in domestic production to avoid being dependent upon foreign trade is not socialist, it's what any sensible government does in any critical sector. Even as peacetime concerns between equal trading partners, every mark spent on imports is one that has to be made up by exports or foreign capital investment, quite aside from the negotiating barrel one is bent over when beholden to foreign production.
@@lotus95t Because Shipping, Chemical, Oil & Engineering companies increasing worldwide access to oil of course had nothing to do with the drop in the worldwide prices for same. Sure. Waiit, were you looking for people to jump on a bandwagon saying the US (& non German industry) was responsible for the Reich's ability to wage war? I've read those before.
@@giupiete6536 You really are stupid. The discussion has nothing to do with the price of oil but of the company's I mentioned supplying tetraethyllead and other patented chemical additives and their formulation to Germany which allowed synthetic fuel to be formulated for use by the German military and especially for aviation fuel, which without the American fuel additives wouldn't have been possible. In fact Dupont was providing the German Air Ministry with tetraethyllead in 1939.
@@edgerlozano9492 They had wood powered tanks, but they were used only for training, you couldn't send those into battle. They did have a diesel powered high altitude spy plane.
@@scratchy996 The Germans had an entire government ministry called the "Ministry of Generators" which was dedicated to supplying plans and equipment to convert civilian, agricultural, and municipal vehicles and applications from liquid fuels go coal/wood gasifiers.
Something to keep in mind is that Stalin agreed to sell oil, food and raw materials to Germany. But Stalin being no fool... he never sold Hitler *too much* oil... just enough so that Germany could invade France... but NOT enough so that Hitler could squirrel it away for a "Barbarrosa" day. Somewhere, there is the grave of some unknown and unsung russian economist/statistician. Someone that calculated in 1939~40 how much oil could be *safely* sold for Germany to consume....but not risk them stockpiling it. He nailed it.🎩
'Pfennig' = German for 'penny', 'hydrogenation' = adding hydrogen to carbon and hydrocarbon molecules to make them into useful alkanes etc. for use as fuel in this case, also used to make margarine. Rothbard is fine on economics, but a nut job on wider history.
TIK is correct when he states standard of living decreases during booms and increases during depression. This is due to Central Banks' interventions in the markets. Prior to the crash on Wall Street, several things played a part in this. First, England was attempting to return to the gold standard which it ended at the beginning of World War I. Like previous wars, the government decided to return to the same rate as when it stopped. The problem was, the Bank of England had drastically increased the amount of paper Pounds (fiat currency) to pay for the war effort. This caused the purchasing power of the pound to fall significantly lower than it was under the gold standard. The massive increasing in the economy due to the increased printing of fiat money, resulted in inflation of prices. As a result, consumers could buy less for the same amount of Pounds than before the gold standard was ended. (This is how the consumers' standards of living decreases during a boom.) Because there were far too many undervalued paper Pounds in circulation, when the government returned to the gold standard massive amounts of gold began to flow out of the Bank of England. This is because holders of paper Pounds could buy more gold than the Pound notes were worth. As a result of the gold loss, the problem became far worse in England and began to shutter the economy. Second, Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Branch of the US Federal Reserve, and at the time the de facto "Chairman" of the Fed decided to intervene. (At the time there was no chairman. However, the NY Branch was the largest and most powerful and effectively led Federal Reserve monetary policy.) Strong decided to use several tactics to stem the gold flow from the UK. His primary one was to lower the interest rates. This allows banks to borrow money from the Central Bank cheaper. As a result, paper dollars (fiat currency) flows into the banks and into the markets. The banks drastically increased the amount of loans they offered in an effort to maximize profits from interest on those loans. All the major banks started doing this. The money flowed into the markets without any real controls on what the loans could be used for. Much of this money flowed into Wall Street as borrowers tried to make a quick buck themselves. Third, the US Treasury added to the inflation by offering to purchased Liberty Bonds at a higher interest rate. This too increased the amount of paper dollars in circulation and decreasing the dollar's purchasing power. Four, with all this money flowing into the markets, the purchasing power of the paper dollar dropped. This did temporarily help stem the flow of gold from the UK. (Also, Strong purchased Pound notes with US gold causing gold to flow back into the UK.) At this time, the Bank of England lowered its interest rates in an effort to kick start its economy. Gold immediately began flowing out of the U.K. again, causing its economy to further slow and enter into a depression. Five, despite moderate inflation due to the increased amount of paper dollars, once gold began to flow out of England again, prices began to fall in America. This was due to much of the money which was created going into loans used on the stock market and land and machinery purchases in farms across America. (Let us assume you want to buy a house. You need $5000 to purchase it and need a loan. However, you cannot secure a loan until you put your money in a bank for a while and then qualify for the loan. So you decide to open an account with the $1000 you do have. Under a fractional reserve banking system we currently have and they did then, the banks create new money through loans. If the bank must hold 10% of investments in reserve, and you deposit $1000, the bank can loan out $900 dollars of your money. The original $1000 is now $1900 dollars due to the loan.) As a result of the lower Federal Reserve interest rates, the banks borrowed more money (took loans) from the Fed. This new money was loaned out and flowed into the economy. Much of it was again deposited into the banks and loans out again, increasing the monetary supply and eroding the purchasing power of the dollar. Despite the supposedly booming economy, consumers could purchase less with each dollar. Their standard of living began to decrease. Six, the Federal Reserve began to worry about the massive increases of the stock market, knowing many of the investments were made with money loaned from banks due to the Federal Reserves own policies. Add to this the collapsing purchasing power of the Pound, Strong began to reverse course and raised interest rate. He was attempting to pull the excess pap dollars from the economy and tighten the availability of credit. This made things worse in the UK and the world in general. As a result, banks needed to pay off their loans to the Fed. The banks started to call in their loans. (Remember that $1000 you put into the bank and the bank could loan out $900, effectively turning $1000 into $1900? Assume the bank did loan out that $900 to another who invested it into the stock market. And also assume that his loan is called. He cashes out his stock and can only pay $500 to the bank. Your original $1000 now is only $600 due to the bad loan.) Seventh, as more loans are called in, banks begin to pay off their Fed loans. Bankruptcies begin to ripple across the economy, especially in state banks and the farming industry. But money lost to bankruptcies mean less money is returned to bank accounts used to make the loans. To Strong's credit, he was able to remove nearly all the excess paper money he injected into the economy prior to the stock market crash. However, growing numbers of bankruptcies are spreading across the economy. At the same time, the credit markets begin to seize up as banks try to stem the losses due to bad loans. As a result, the number of people investing in the stock market quickly drops. Investors spook and begin selling off stock at the highest prices. The stock market crashes, billions of dollars lost. Companies begin to declare bankruptcies further depleting cash reserves of banks due to loans. Those in the know start to remove their saving from banks just in case the banks reserves are insolvent. Remember, on bank runs, first come, first served. As more people panic, more come to the bank to get their money. (Remember your $1000 deposit which is now only $600 due to a bad loan? You rush the bank. When you finally get to the teller window and pull out your money, the teller hands you the last $400 left in the vault. You have lost $600 and the bank is out of business.) Bank collapses ripple across the country and people lose savings. Markets collapse. Prices begin to collapse as bankruptcies increase and product supply increases. Eight, people find themselves evicted from houses and farms because the cannot pay off their loans. People lose their jobs as companies collapse. Sales of all products decline as their stocks increase, causing prices to collapse farther. (You are lucky. Though your wages fall, as they would have at the time, you are able to keep your job. And though you lost $600 due to the collapse of your bank, you still have $400. You notice the cheap prices of houses at sheriff's sales as banks are willing to take pennies on the dollars from the few people who still have money to recover whatever money they can to prevent their own collapses. You grab your $400 dollars and head to one on a house you like. Since you are one of the few people with money, you buy the house at auction for $350. The depression has increased your standard of living. This is even more secure because you still have a job.) This is what happened and still happens. When the US housing market collapsed, the prices of all house fell. Many people who were smart with their money were able to upgrade their houses due to the collapse. Prior to that, they were stuck unable to purchase better housing. Look at Venezuala. The collapsing price of oil and the massive increases in their monetary supply resulted in the hyperinflation they are suffering through now. Look at the stagnant purchasing power of wages despite moderately increasing wages we are currently seeing now, despite a booming economy. TIK is 100% spot on. I suggest everyone read America's Great Depression to understand the mechanisms he is talking about. It is completely laid out in the book and is germane to this discussion.
Hi TIK, big fan for a while now. Just wanted to say these Q&A style videos are great, particularly in the format they're currently in. I listen to them while playing strategy games, or convert them to mp3 and use as podcasts while driving to work etc. These long historiography type discussion videos that don't require visual attention (as oppose to battlestorm videos with maps and other graphics) are perfect. Keep up the good work!
Re: droping price of oil, wasn't it they have found huge oil fields in Texas and elsewhere so price for oil went down as global supply was much bigger than demand?
Yes, but you have to understand that before the 20's, there really wasn't that much of a demand for oil. Almost everything was run on coal, but that's not to say that people didn't know where to find oil. Once the gasoline engine was perfected, and was shown to run much more efficiently, and automobiles became cheap enough for people to actually afford, oil prospectors ALL rushed to start drilling at the same time, thus causing a huge influx of oil production worldwide, not just in the United States.
Contrary to most of the studies, the fuel supply was tight for most of the the war, but it was not critical until the US bombing campaign switched to the oil plants thanks to an spy ring run out of Sweden that fed detailed information to the Allies about what facilities were critical. Once the bombs found the right targets it started an oil collapse they never recovered from. The real problem with the synthetic fuels is the huge energy costs. And the fact that their process was incredibly dirty. The minerals and other contaminants in the low grade coal in German hands made the process wretchedly complex. I speak from some experience with working with synthetics and the newest processes have far higher yields.
Here are a few interesting/fun things about oil, diesel, avgas, and gasoline you might not know: - Germany problem is thermodynamics. If it wants fuel from coal, it need coal to run electricity generators to run conversion plants. that's expensive, but do able. - They have a shelf life. The lighter the distillation fraction they came from, the shorter the shelf life. For example: gasoline is the lightest and most volatile and its shelf life is about 3 months. Avgas and diesel is more stable and most will last only a year or so. Wars are rare, only once or so per one or two generations. This makes stockpiling ready fuel incredibly difficult. So if you want a war with any kind of endurance at all, you will need big stockpile of crude oil and refineries ready to ramp up the fuel supplies. These facilities are also essentially state-owned/funded/subsidised and cut off from the market. - Viewing from this lens, the synthetic fuel from coal can be a strategic resource since coal last essentially forever and even longer shelf life than crude oil. If all you have is coal and oil need to be imported; imports can be cut but coal + coal conversion plants + coal fired electricity generation, you can get enough fuel for some limited operation. Germany's problem is really a case of biting off more than they could chew. That setup will be perfectly viable for advance through well railroaded regions where supplies strain can be alleviated somewhat with coal-fired rail transports. Once they are not on rail country and had to use trucks; that's it. - One proposal from Wesley Clark, US. General for a strategy to make America energy independent was to ... holy shit, turn coal into liquid fuel. Well, that needs electricity. If you already have electricity, why not run cars on batteries? the only thing that is cannot be run with batteries are jet-powered aircrafts. So use the fuel to do that. America is already the largest oil production country in the world right now.
Excellent post. I have wondered about the synthetic oil issue and you have cleared up most of my questions here. A few details that are not really huge but still might be useful to you: One German fighter pilot reported that he switched to night fighter duty in 1943. There was a training program for day fighter pilots to switch to night fighting. It was designed to take 90 days. Due to fuel shortages in 1943, it took nine months. Another detail: One major expense of coal gasification was steel. The methods at that time took a very large number of steel vessels--to the point that the entire supply of steel in the 3rd Reich simply could not supply enough. Finally, I recently read that while the jet engines could burn many fuels, the best fuel available was synthetic. The engines could burn diesel fuel but with less efficiency. In a pinch they could burn gasoline, but with significantly reduced efficiency.Thanks again,Jay Maupin
One could easily argue that the low margins in the stock market ($1 could buy $10 of stock) was to blame. EVERYONE was buying leveraged stocks and when the first bump happened everyone started calling in the margins and the free flow of capital suddenly stopped.
That makes perfect sense in peacetime markets, but once Barbarrossa failed, Germany was locked into a fight to the death against the U.S.S.R. . Given the stakes, why would prices, stocks, debt & deficits matter to Hitler & the O.K.C.? The only reason I can come up with iss that Germany still needed to purchase or trade for coal & minerals from Sweden, Finland & Norway, so it was necessary to have the German currency worth something. Otherwise, I don't understand why Germany vdidn't ignore the costs, upgrade/expand Romanian oil production facilities & produce as much natural & synthetic oil asxpossible. .
the problem is that instead of focusing on producing synthetic oil, hitler wasted valuable resources on obsolete things like: 1. the Atlantic wall, which in many areas was more of a propaganda piece than really a defensive position, as the German machine guns took far more lives than those cannons etc that surrendered without firing. 2. the bomb v1 and v2, a waste that by itself, already made the Germans lose the war. 3. Holocaust logistics and resources 4. gustav cannon etc 5.The cover of the soldiers' water container was aluminum, and the gas mask case was iron, that's for more than 10,000,000 soldiers .6 Allied bombing was not prioritized, instead hitler continued with plans for the horten, arado, flying lighter; they did not even centralize the factories so that the luftwaff could protect them, instead of having to disperse the luftwaff throughout the erope, dividing the perimeter into many barriers and weakening their defensive capabilities .7 he wasted resources on a surface navy that couldn't be finished, instead of uboats from the start . the list of resources wasted is much longer, that and much more could have generated more synthetic fuel, making the luftwaff have no fuel to train pilots and defend factories. how many factories were destroyed by the mismanagement of resources. Hitler didn't even try to take over the Mediterranean oil wells after the fall of the france. And since the ussr could withdraw and cut off the gas supply at any time, the idea of focusing every resource on synthetic gasoline was no mystery. And it only declared total war in 42 to 43, when the United Kingdom had already taken drastic measures since 41, the same Red Army and in the USA, drastic measures were taken, while the Germans tried to disassociate with v1 and v2, tigers etc etc.
@TIK Putting my Chemist's hat on: the Germans went down the WRONG road WRT coal to liquids. They adopted HIGH PRESSURE conversion technology. This was an EPIC error. High Pressure tanks used exotic steels that Germany was short of. That was the hang-up. That's why coal-to-liquid was so expensive. It was the STEEL. This is the same steel that you needed for your tanks, submarines, surface fleet -- etc. The Correct solution was to use the LOW Pressure path. This is nothing more exotic than pure distillation to produce 'Coal Tars' -- BTW, a British technology that was more than a century old. The Americans perfected it by the 1920s -- and had patents issued. It, the American solution, was NOT a secret. It just didn't appeal to German chemists. They over designed their path to liquids. In the Low Pressure scheme, coal is distilled -- and the waste is not converted into liquids. It is merely shifted over to thermo-electric power plants and BURNED as is. This was an economic revolution -- if seized. In the 19th Century there was no-one to purchase the waste coal solids -- but the electric power industry changed that equation. Mere distillation produces one-barrel of liquids for each ton of coal. Germany was mining millions of tons of coal per year. The octane rating of distilled coal tar is virtually certain to be higher than the crap the Nazis were cranking out. The High Pressure route to liquids has never pencilled out for anybody.
Interesting video ! Also FWIW its pronounced hyd-ro-genation , which is just the process of adding hydrogen atoms to carbon-carbon bonds in an unsaturated compound. Keep up the good work !
Thankfully, Military history not visualized went into deeper depth of the messed up logistics that did not help the Reich in basic transport of well....literally anything to either civilians or its soldiers. Also interestingly like you he mentioned they had plenty of coal, but that they had neither the manpower or even modernized tools (or the ability to continuously modernize) to make up the lost production for their needs. Well at least we can learn from our enemy's mistakes.
Another problem was over engineering. Panther bearings where being made to last thirty years, when the tanks themselves would be lucky to last thirty days in some instances.
According to Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles, synthetic oil also had fewer aromatic compounds, which are needed for production of the highest quality fuels.
That's the process used in the Alberta Tar Sands, the Bitumen is extracted from the Sand using steam injection, this Bituman is then infused with hydrocarbons extracted from the abundant Natural Gas. That is what makes it *Synthetic* fuel/Oil.
With modern thermal and catalytic cracking, polymerization, hydrogenation, isomerization, and alkylation technologies, the point is totally moot. You can synthesize any octane booster you want. The Germans probably didn't have that much technology though.
You want branched molecules rather than aromatics. Aromatics must be kept to a reasonable minimum as they coke up during consumption and create some dioxin emissions which are fairly harmful. That’s why some refineries actually have benzene saturation units to meet the modern gasoline spec. The point is valid though, as Fischer Tropsch produces mainly linear molecules so the synthetic crude must be processed further to increase the number of branched hydrocarbons. It’s not a major cost though.
Sometimes things are very simple. German soldier said: we knew we could not win, even before we got near Moscow. As my mother said: what are you going to do? Walk all the way to Siberia?"
@The Nova renaissancei know that. However,, there are not enough Germans to hold even a part of that territory. And any normal person could see that. Just another proof that all generals and politicians are psychopaths.
I worked as a chemist in the 80's (fuel crisis) on a synthetic fuel plant in the UK (at a major UK oil company) using German/South African technology from that era and it is very inefficient and required rare earth elements to make the catalyst from parts of the world under Allied control. It was a good experiment and we made from Avgas to Waxes. The modern technology is there but has been deliberately shelved for obvious geopolitical reasons.
@@altaiaurelius if you are an oil company why would you compete with yourself at much more expensive price, we can make synthetic oil, the global economy relies on the petro dollar and is happy fighting wars over it.
Rai Karklins So perhaps governments could be the ones to lead the research on how to more efficiently produce synthetic fuel from corn/ethanol or nuclear energy? The global economy and its power players are terrifying when I read your account of this.
@@altaiaurelius there already is good enzyme technology for converting waste cellulose into ethanol. Just like with all renewable energy it is up against the military industrial complex Eisenhower predicted. The world economy thrives off wars in case you had not noticed. There is also technology to run cars of hydrogen using solar to split water, very simple, but resisted like crazy (honda).
A defecit also build up over time for as long as the war go on. If you start with to little of a resource, this problem will get much worse for as long as you dont get a product to cover for the need. Reserves will be depleted, missions and operations gets canned - and all this serve to build up a strategic weakness that will accelerate until the war is over. This goes fpr any conflict - be it armed, a trade war etcetera. And it can be applied to anything of strategic value.
A lot of the comments rightfully focus on the poor conversion efficiency of synthetic oil production, but it’s worth remembering that coal to liquids produces a synthetic crude that is mostly converted into final products without much further loss. Refining at the time was mostly topping refineries that converted perhaps 50-70% of the feedstock crude oil into light and medium refined products, with the rest being heavy heating oil, residue and refinery light gases used for internal power generation. Generally the major stumbling block is the sheer capital required to build the plants to produce synthetic fuel products. Much like EU is finding out with its green policies, even subsidised economics can only get you so far.
German coal production in 1940 was 130 million tons, if it takes 22 tons to make a ton of oil that's about 6 million tons of oil, oil requirements for Axis controlled Europe, according to the video was 20 million tons, even if only 4.5 tons are needed to make a ton of oil the cost in coal to make the required oil is huge; coal is also required for steel production, electricity etc., other things essential to make the economy work and ensure the armies can be supplied. Oil is not easily substituted by coal.
German coal production was much more than 130 million with also lignites.They produced 277 million ton in 1914 with lignites(154 hard coal,coke and other types and 123 million tons of lignites).
@@AFT_05G Yes, reading some sources state a figure for coal and include in that 'brown coal' (lignites) or just coal, either way it takes a lot of effort by coal miners and in processing to replace oil with coal.
TLDR: It's super inefficient to make synthetic oil. They did it, but it just ultimately wasn't viable as a solution in the quantities that they needed it.
Toprani is no chemist. The problem was that Germany's chemists fell in love with a HIGH PRESSURE process. This is where the money went. It, their process, required the most expensive steels and a LOT of compressor power. (electricity and super-scale motors) Stumping up the money was never the issue. Just building the plants was a killer. Germany could've gone with the ancient (British) process of straight distillation. That required 19th Century technology -- and ordinary steels. The char residue could then have been utilized as boiler feed all over the German economy. They simply BLEW IT.
@@solarfreak1107 The 19th Century folks called the distilled product coal-oil. You'll hear such references in many a Hollywood 'period' film. Petroleum based oil was the minor fraction of production until Rockefeller standardized refining in Ohio. Hence his brand: Standard (standardized) Oil. [He made his breakthrough with kerosene that had no gasoline vapors in it.] The destructive distillation of coal to produce coke for blast furnaces is a huge business even today. However, the coals used are chosen for their properties in iron reduction: low sulfur, low phosphorous. For the Nazis, the play was to destructively distill 'steam coal' - the stuff that the Red Chinese and Indians have run short of. This process does not produce sweet coke -- but it does release far, far more volatiles -- which when condensed -- become very, very light 'crude oil' -- also termed 'gas oil' as it is a liquid recovered from hot gassified vapors by the process. The kicker for the Nazis was that such an industrial process does not require exotic, high quality steels. It does not involve really high pressures. It was not viable once cheap petroleum became widely available -- especially after Spindle top in Texas. (1903) But, until then, coal distillation condensate dominated the fuel liquids market. Before steam turbine driven alternators, the waste coke from said distillation was a drug on the market. But by 1935, the Krauts were in a position to partner up every distillation plant with a plain vanilla steam power plant -- of which the Nazis needed no end of. THAT was their play -- and they blew it. The Nazis were destined to lose the war -- no matter what they did. But with coal oil, they would've had a route to far more liquid fuels at a practical cost. Thank the heavens that the Nazis were technical dolts. BTW, a single ton of steam coal figures to emit about 1.3 barrels of coal oil condensate... IF you're using lighter, wetter thermal coal. At worst, you're looking at 1 barrel per ton. Nazi Germany was mining millions of tons per year -- over 300,000 tons per day...(adding in the occupied nations.) Scaling up to 100,000 bbl per day might have been possible. Then the Nazi fuel crisis would be over.
@@82dorrin I've been here a lot longer than you zoomer. The comments section used to be pure cancer but still fun. Somehow you morons managed to make it even worse with your unoriginal low-IQ spam. Why are you phishing for likes anyway? This isn't reddit. The internet was better without you scrubs.
@@loneeagle901 Yes. It's an unoriginal comment, they're everywhere. It's a slight variation of the 'I'm a simple man, I see the video, I click' meme. If people weren't allowed to 'like' comments, all this dumbass spam would disappear immediately.
Since the "cost" of converting coal into oil is mainly in that it takes a lot of coal and time to do, and Germany was perfectly willing to burn through lots of its huge coal supplies to do this, the real issue was not the cost-inefficiency of the process (which was irrelevant to Germany, since it was at war and had lots of coal), but that they simply hadn't created ENOUGH infrastructure for the conversion process to create nearly enough oil to cover its needs. Now, maybe it was simply impossible for it to do so in the time that it had. But that was the crux of the problem, really. Germany created its own problems by going to war when it did.
My uncle who was a Tanker in WWII remarked years ago about how they captured Luftwaffe airfields at the end of the war with rows of brand new planes sitting together, with no fuel or pilots. The troops knew in 1944/45 that the Nazis were out of gas, literally. The Nazis lost the war on Dec. 11, 1941.
@UCbVaC1do_vc9IH9tkdUgFfQ (1) If you said that About the URSS you are a 1diot. (2) If you are refering to the USA, Germany no declared war in USA, USA declared war on Germany, Hitler just made it de jure.
I still think the best book on the subject is wages of destruction. It explained that synthetic petrol was very expensive, and they didn't have enough facilities. Also despite plentiful coal supplies, the Nazi empire had a major coal shortage. The book said that with better management, that was one of the shortages that could have been solved.
I’m not sure, but I imagine that they could have accessed it if they’d started early enough. It would still take a few years to build the infrastructure (roads, rail systems, ports), refineries and technology necessary. An Italian geologist and cartographer named Arditi Desio found oil in the 1930’s.
I’m not sure that it was to deep. Libya managed to drill it about a decade later with far less money, resources and technical expertise. I agree that it would take a few years to build the infrastructure and equipment necessary to pump commercial amounts of it though.
They would have to have shipped that oil back to Europe for processing. Which required more fuel that the italian navy didn't have, hence their navy staying in port for long periods of time.
South Africa had a similiar situation as germany during aparthied. That is why the state owned company Sasol is an expert in the technology of converting coal into oil.
How much of a factor was the shale oil production in Austria, France and elsewhere. This form of oil production had been about for almost 100 years and was quite developed as a process by the 1930s/40s.
Elsewhere includes Estonia. Shale oil production was one reason why Hitler insisted on trying to hold the Baltic states in 1944 long after his strategic position there was viable.
@@m2heavyindustries378 yeh the big heaps/hills off shale piled outside the village i live in. ever been to central scotland. or you could just google it. ruclips.net/video/HN3dBhiP3O4/видео.html
For your question in this video asking if the US or Venezuela was the worlds largest oil producer, the answer is the USA by a large amount. The US produced 180 million metric tons of oil in 1940. The next largest was Venezuela at 30 million MT followed by the USSR with 27 million MT of oil. After that ranks 4 and 5 were Iran and Indonesia with around 8 million MT per year.
FischerTropsch process chemical engineers were brought to the US under project Paperclip, and plants were made in the US in the 1950s. Cheap oil made that process inefficient in the US too.
Japan literally went to war over oil as well. At the same time that Japan was screaming for oil, the US was using oil on its runways to keep the dust down. The Battle of the Bulge was also about capturing Allied fuel depots, as it did not have enough oil to continue the drive to split the Allies in two. Joachim Piper's plan to spearhead the assault was initially deemed as too risky to succeed. But his odds of success were greater than the overall battle plan, so Piper was allowed to proceed, and represented the greatest thrust into Allied lines. The Germans only had about a thousand tanks for the winter offensive, but it was the lack of fuel more than Allied resistance that eventually stopped them. And Piper was eventually forced to abandon his equipment and march back to Germany, along with his remaining men.
I don't agree at all that it was a lack of fuel rather then Allied resistance that stopped the German winter offensive in 1944. The Germans won the first few battles during that offensive when they were attacking green units not expecting to be hit with a major German offensive. But once the Germans started fighting more experienced US units the US units held the Germans back from advancing any further. The battle for Bastogne where the 101st Airborne and 10 Armored divisions is given a ton of attention during the battle of the Bulge that they rightfully deserve for greatly delaying the German attack plans but the US divisions outside of the bulge did just as much to hold the Germans in and prevent them from completing their goals. The Germans still had the fuel to move their armored units around even at the end of the battle when they started pulling the remainder of their armored units back to their starting line. And then also right from the start of the battle the US units prevented the Germans from taking many of the roads they wanted to use during their initial plans for the Winter offensive.
Piper was not the furthest Panzer advance, it was the 2nd Panzer and there advance was blocked by Monty moving the Third Army Group to stop them at the Meuse.
@@benwilson6145 I'm not sure what you are talking about there. There was no such thing as a 3rd Army group. The 21st Army Group was the most Northern Allied Army Group commanded by Monty which had the British 2nd army and Canadian 1st army in it and sometimes the US 9th army like during the Battle of the Bulge. Then there was the 12th Army group commanded by Omar Bradly which was made up of all US armies. South of that was the 6th Army group which was made up of US and French armies. And then in Italy was the 15th Army group which had a US and "British" army (the 8th army at this point was more made up of more international divisions then it was British divisions at this point) in it. When the Germans attacked it split the US 1st and 9th army off from 12th Army group HQ so Eisenhower put them under Monty's 21st army group. The US 1st and 9th armies held the north half of the bulge while Patton and the US 3rd army counter attacked from the South. Also the US 1st and 9th armies had already begun their counterattack from the North before they were put under Monty's command. Montgomery has been given a lot of criticism for what he said after the Battle of Bulge because he made it seem like in his post battle press conference that he saved the day when the US generals and their armies were already counterattacking before being put under his command. And the main counter attack by the US 3rd Army was not under Monty's command at all. Monty then had to issue a apology after this press conference and Churchill found it necessary in a speech to Parliament to explicitly state that the Battle of the Bulge was purely an American victory (Even though British troops did fight in the battle a bit). It would be like saying that the Battle of El Alamein was partially a American victory because some American fighters and bombers took part in the battle.
The Germans were getting oil from Venezuela via neutral Spain, they were even refueling U Boats of the African coast from the S. American tankers. The Wall St. bankers knew all about it. The Germans were using an older method of coal/oil conversion. The Americans had developed the Karrick method in the 1920's that was more efficient than the Nazi German Bergius process.
Germans invented both the Bergius process, referred to here as direct hydrogenation of coal, and the Fischer-Tropsch process, the creation of synthetic crude from classified coal (or biomass or garbage).
For people who don't understand the critical flaw of the synthetic oil argument, being forced to mine 4.5-22 times the amount of coal you need to produce a unit of oil also require that order of magnitude of logistical capacity and investment and construction of infrastructure and industry to support it. Not to mention that the country already was using a lot of the existing capacity to FIGHT A WAR. I just don't see this happening in any alternate reality.
Hey @TIK, any plans on covering German on-soil oil production? I have lived in the city of Celle, which is basically THE German oil town. Now just recently while doing some digging on German oil production in WW2 for a HoI4 mod I came across the remains of the attempts of the Nazis to increase oil production from the fields here in the 1940s. Apparently these plans only died in 1945 and were continued for some time in the 1950s, but never took off. Some of the buildings remain in a forested area around 25km from here. Currently it isn't financially sound to try to extract said oil, but apparently the deposits are quite large (compared to what we have here in other areas, North Sea not included). BTW the whole area was the main German fuel production center during WW1 and up to WW2. It covered the largest part of the civilian requirements pre-WW2. If you need any help if you ever want to cover this feel free to drop me a mail, I have some contacts to the official district historians.
Unfortunately, I've only recently managed to get to him. The Marxists kept criticizing me for reading Rothbard when I wasn't, so I just had to comply to the collective and start reading him
@@TheImperatorKnight Gerne doch. Ist echt ein super Buch. zBsp geht er auch ziemlich ins Detail betreffend der japanischen Versuche synthetische Treibstoffe herzustellen.
@@mikefay5698 Not in 1944-1945 they didn't. The RAF got about 18% of bombs aimed at the Oil plants within the grounds of the factory in all weathers between June 1944 and the end of the war in all weathers. The USAAF effort was weather dependant during the same period, but a figure of 26% was normal in very good weather, down to 5% if they bombed on H2X radar. 80% of the time they had do bomb on radar fixes. The de-housing plan, which wasn't the RAF's idea, but that of Churchill's Science Adviser Lindermann and was only policy from February 1942 to January 1943 when it was superseded by the Combined Bomber Offensive policy. The 1942 policy was driven by the fact that the new GEE navigation system was only accurate to plus or minus 5 miles at maximum range and to overwhelm the air defences a bomber stream had to be used which mean the aircraft didn't have time to piss about trying to ID a specific target (which in most cases they couldn't see even with air dropped flares due to weather or industrial haze (Smog). Bomber Command's main issue was 50% of their bombs landed in open country. This was because of an effect known as Creep back. As the raid progressed, the bombers at the middle and rear of the stream tended to drop their loads short. The net result was the bomb plot tended to be up to 4 miles long from were the first bombs (and target markers) landed and the last bombs. Bomber Command's misson in 1943 was to destroy a twon or city as an economic entity by taking out all of the things in it that allow it to operate. I.E. The Power Station, The Gas Works, The Water Works, the mains distribution system that gets the Electricity, Gas and water from where it is made to where it is needed. The Coal yards, the Railway network, the Tram and Buses, the Canal's, plus the smaller industry which is dual hatted in that they make sub components for the weapons, as well as stuff for civilian use. All of these assest tent to be dotted all around the towns and cities and not just in one corner of them. Oh and you kill the workers (which in the UK are children, women and old men). Kids like my Father who helped make aircraft parts with my Grandfather in a shed in north east London in 1943/44.
Small hint: The aviation fuel especially for fast fighters was the biggest problem as this needed to be also the best quality and iirc could not be made from synthetic fuel.. the Japanese had it even worse btw
Thermodynamics isn't terrible by some standards. According to one scientist after the war, on average it took about 1 ton of coal to synthesize 1 barrel of oil- about 7 times less. Assuming that's the lignite Germany usually used as feedstock, then it would have about 1/3 the energy density of its mass in oil. This would mean Germany was putting in 7 tons of coal for the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal, or about 40% thermal efficiency. www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080327_RL34133_5320447491700d8c35c78624a956317f1baa8401.pdf (pages 8 and 16) At the same time, a diesel locomotive in WW2 had about 30% thermal efficiency (page 22 below): utahrails.net/pdf/EMD_567_History_and_Development_1951.pdf So the total thermal efficiency of a diesel locomotive in WW2 running on coal converted to synthetic oil is about 12%. Meanwhile, the very good steam locomotives had 6% thermal efficiency in WW2- the most efficient steam locomotive ever built had 12% efficiency (built by André Chapelon): www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Railroads/Railroad_Costs.htm (Data on the Big Boy taken from Kratville's book; it calculates to about 6% efficiency if coal was bituminous). So synthetic oil isn't always bad in thermodynamic terms- it looks good compared to a 6% efficient steam locomotive.
@@THX-zk3qq It's not really that, it's more of the fact that Germany is using one critical resource to convert into another critical resource. You can't produce steel without coal.
Something I always find interesting in regards to oil and lend lease in WW2 was that the US supplied the USSR with the majority of it's oil used for their air force. Apparently the oil produced in the USSR was not good for aircraft so the USSR was sent oil from the US to use on their aircraft.
@@benwilson6145 Yeah that could be it. It is possible that different oil is taken out of the ground in different locations as well I guess. I'm no expert on oil or what type of oil is best to use where. I just know that the USSR used a bunch of oil from the US for their planes.
@@PhillyPhanVinny Oil from the ground wasn't the issue, it's just that the Soviet petrochemical industry at the time wasn't able to produce the additives needed to create 100/130/150 octane aviation gasoline in the quantities needed.
After 1935 it took 2 and 1/2 Marks to buy 1 US Dollar. 100 Pfenigs to the Mark. About 12 Marks to buy a Pound. That 1938 Dollar is about $18.75 today. So a 1938 Mark is equivalent to almost 47 Marks today. That is inflation at work. Until the 1970s oil traded for about $20 per barrel or one barrel per ounce of gold. Roughly it took an ounce of gold to buy a barrel of oil, that is the foreign exchange problem and here a better value of oil.
Synthetic refineries got nerfed with the 1941 update. And the developers forgot to put coal as a resource so they're completely broken. Worst Germany war ever! Will not replay scenario.
Just like they added fuel back to hoi4 we need to tell parafox to bring coal back, for that very reason!
@@rickmoreno6858 For the damn navies at the very least, also I think he already were referring to HOI4.
Robert don't make the third time the charm son
Oh, please. Just build 14/4s with the right battalions and steamroll everyone with soft attack. Tanks are wasteful in SP.
plus they inconveniently discovered oil in Germany AFTER the war. different replay value and powerup
The really crazy thing is that the entire axis shortfall of ten million tonnes a year translates to ~182,000 barrels a day. Germany's oil consumption today is about 2.3 million barrels a day, in peacetime. Shows how oil dependant our modern socities have become.
We have spent the last half century pulling oil out of the ground and turning it into lots of people, basically.
I read an interesting paper awhile back - quite exhaustive and with numerous citations - explaining all the oil that went into everything in our civilization. ....and how it is not replaceable and how other things are not scalable. (a "substitute" exists, but by its mere existence it does not magically bless oil dependency away, because it cannot be SCALED UP to any meaningful degree ..and in the final analysis usually turns out to exist only due to the existence of the broader oil economy)
Anyone talking about ending use of oil and coal is talking about genocide on a never before seen scale. Great Leap Forward and Holodomor killed tens of millions. This would kill billions. And our response is to hang lapel pins of virtue on ourselves that are evocative of, symbolic of, having a solution, and the moral symbol shall bless and save us, presumably. When someone preaches that we should just mindlessly flip the off switch, I say you first, you first.
Climbing down gracefully and intelligently from the teetering peak we have reached would be the greatest civilizational achievement ever. If we think we don't have to, there are many thousands of nuclear fuel rods waiting to call our bluff and cook off into the atmosphere if we do it in any other way. When the Romans collapsed, it was just a matter of swamps and malaria coming back while some aqueducts fell apart.
@@joebobhenrybob2000 AKA, the Great Reset.
Honestly, I think it worked the other way around.
They still did not understand how crucial and war ending a lack of oil is.
So after LEARNING their mistakes, they NOW have 2,3 million.
And still, that's actually not an insane amount of oil, Americans have 30 million in reserve.
The German Military used most of their oil on the approach to The Soviets.. and ran out of 'enough oil to maintain an army'.
By the time Germans reached the Vulga they had been using horses, not oil, and then eating or losing the horses grazing areas.
So, who still thinks the Germans were an "Elite" force?
No one.
They sucked as an army, didn't understand modern warfare, and we're utterly destroyed by 17 year old Antifa like communist.
I would be embarrassed to lose to the Soviets.
Especially because, in the east, Germans had more men than the Soviets.
And still lost.
@@joebobhenrybob2000 just imagine poor Israel, surrounded by enemies and yet chose the coastline of the Mediterranean instead of going inland and milking the teets of middle eastern oil.🛢️
That is how little we knew of the quantity we would end up using over time.
@@joebobhenrybob2000 I whole heartedly agree.That has always been my question. Do you have a link for the paper that you read?
Why didn't Manstein simply turned water into oil?
Hitler refused to let Manstein have any water as he insisted that Manstein subsist only on yaks milk. Thus, plainly, it was Hitler's fault and Manstein could have done it if mad man Hitler had let him. Praise be to Manstein.
Ho c'mon...Rommel's figure is far too much enlarged than Manstein's...Not to mention, patton's...
Manstein turning water into oil? Whoahahahahahaha! :D He should have been sent to a polytechnical university instead of the Kriegsacademie instead. I can imagine Manstein in charge of a major conglomerate like the I.G. Farben or Bayers instead of Army Group South. In this hypothetical case, I wonder how Manstein the CEO would have affected World War.
Der heilige Mannstein hätte auch einfach aus dem Nichts Öl materialisieren können...
(wenn es ihm der böse Adi nicht verboten hätte und darauf bestanden hätte dass er für seine Sünden leidet)
He was too busy turning truth into whine
I guess the oil shortage is partly why they used horses to tow a significant portion of their artillery instead of half tracks.
You are absolutely correct
Germany in WWI had also lost over 16 million horses and horsepower had replaced horses by WWII, so even they were not in great supply. Much of their transport and field kitchens relied on horses, and only the US could field entire mechanized Divisions.
@@_Abjuranax_ The British and Commonwealth forces were mechanised by the end of WW2.
@@_Abjuranax_ Well the British could also. Those Universal Carriers were pretty useful.
Not to mention, motorized units are no better off than foot-mobile units in places with poor road network surrounded by a plenty of mud. This was the case with the Soviet union during its spring and autumn seasons. However, the Ardennes operation also encountered a similarly horrible ground condition which played a big part in completely throwing off the German timetable. This operation required that 6th Panzer Army cross Meuse River by no later than the 18th or the 19th of December 1944, barely 3 days after the beginning of this operation. Because of the mud, panzer divisions lacked cross-country capability and were confined to roads and towns. Not surprisingly, this also led to very nasty traffic congestion.
The production of synthetic oil requires massive inputs of other forms of energy, primarily electricity. Germany had two major sources of electricity: hydroelectric and steam turbine (basically, coal-burning). Hydroelectric is pretty cheap once the costs of the infrastructure (dams) are covered, but it's not available everywhere. Otherwise Germany was burning coal to convert other coal into a more mobile form of fuel. The massive inefficiency is obvious.
@The Colonel Well, yes. If your objective is to subjugate other peoples rational economics must take the backseat.
@The Colonel Maybe so. Magical thinking can take anyone anywhere.
Apartheid South Africa was blockaded. They could get no oil. Sasol project turned coal to oil.
S Africa had plenty coal. S African guerilla's tried to blow it up Sasol. Economy goes to the wall when neccesity rheigns!
@The Colonel Horses were the main method of transport for the Whermacht, plent of hay and oats!
@The Colonel People forget that WW1 was only 20 years past. The rear of the German and Red Armies depended on horses, even some Camels made it to Berlin.
Around 1943, the allies started bombing the huge synthetic complexes in their "Oil First" bombing campaign.
Yes indeed, however the bombing of the Polesti oil production facilities (in Romania) & synthetic oil manufacturing elsewhere proved to be extremely costly for the 8th Air Force & R.A.F., so these raids could not be carried-out on a rwgular basis. Furthermore, I recall reading that repairs to these industries were carried out quickly & production eventually returned to normal. So, I wonder if the Allied bombing campaign significantly worsened Germany's oil crisis in 1943 and/or 1944... 🤔
Derek Baker axis lost at stalingrad
@@midnatts-kornajoel2224 Yes, I know that. 🙂
Hitting the pinch points in production, like ball bearings, looks to have produced better results. Although killing off your experienced pilots and tank crews wasn’t a good path to sustainability.
@phantom killer087 😁
Also, too, the Germans were expending a huge percentage of the fuel driving that fuel to the hopelessly extended front lines.
Coach Hannah that problem seemed to sort itself out over time.
Rockwell - OK, if by that you mean Germany collapsed back onto its supply lines, conjoined with the losses accrued to its mechanized forces in the field.
Exactly. Not a solution they were hoping for, but a solution nevertheless
Miike Hunt - They tried. Not nearly enough engineers or construction staff. Barbarossa was run on a shoestring.
They had the trains to take supplies to the depots, but were limited on the trucks and the fuel for the trucks to take the supplies from the depots to the front lines, and relied on horse. Logistical nightmare indeed.
in his book "Achtung Panzer " written in 1937 , toward the end of the book ,
Guderian write than his doubts on the available supply of oil and rubber had been dispelled
by learning of the ongoing progress in synthetic production of oil and buna rubber ,
it was in fact grossly optimistic
One of the driving factors in German jet aircraft development was they could be run on low grade kerosene. Easier and cheaper to make from synthetics.
Standard Oil sold IG Farben the process for increasing octane ratings in low grade fuel before the war so even synthetic oil could be boosted.
Also, the Jumo jet engines required about one fifth the labor and money to construct as compared to the late war German piston engines, so it was a win-win. The lack of high grade alloys meant short lifespans for the Jumo engines.
@@amerigo88 RELATIVELY short lifespans. We're talking about 25 hour *maintenance periods,* not full lifespan of the engine. It was the time when engine would be fully dissassembled and checked. So it was normal for engine to survive 2 such periods ie 50 hours or even 3 ie 75 hours.
Meanwhile late war prop engines of Allies driven to their limit already had a lifespan of _only 100 hours._ So "unreliable" jet engine built without required materials could match to a half or more of lifespan of much more expensive prop engine.
They had to run on low octane fuel, they didn't choose to. For example the ~35l V12 DB605 engine with methanol-water injection from a late war BF-109 produced up to 2000hp with 87 octane fuel compared to the 27l V12 Merlin from a late war P-51 that could reach about the same ~2000hp useing 100 octane fuel. Postwar Merlins where equipped with the same MW injection system for racing and reached up to 3800hp!
@@hernerweisenberg7052 plus ideally you don’t want methanol or ethanol running in plane parts due the the fact both encourage water to get in the fuel and that’s gonna add to maintenance issues. Hell in peace time it would be an outright safety issue.
A pfennig was a German penny, worth 100 pf per mark, and during about '40-'45, they produced the Riechsmark and were also 100 pf per r.m. All replaced by the euro in about 2002, I think.
It is much more complicated, there had been a lot of consequent and even parallel currencies in Germany's history.
Reichsmark (which replaced Rentenmark in 1924 which replaced Mark after 1923 hyperinflation) was replaced by TWO Deutsche Mark currencies in 1948 (sparkling the first Berlin crisis). In 1991 the East German Mark was abandoned for the West German Deutsche Mark, which was replaced by the Euro eventually.
A Pfenning is one 100th of a Mark. It is the counterpart to the American penny.
just remember to add 70 years of inflation. Triple the oil prices while being on limited production isn't a good thing no matter the numbers
Pfennig = penny. Surprised TIk was like 'whatever that is'
We will have to give him a penny for his thoughts ....
Be kind to TIK, he probably spends so long in the past he hasn't caught up with decimalisation and must still think we have 20 shillings, ie 240d (pennies), in the pound ;-)
Here is some interesting data just for comparison. If we take a rough conversion of the German Mark to American Dollars (of about 2.5M=$1) we will find that the synthetic gasoline cost about 9.2¢ to produce while at the same time consumers were paying, in the US, about 4.22¢ per liter for oil derived gasoline.
This is why nuclear power is so cool- the waste heat from the reaction can power both the Fischer-Tropsch and Haber-Bosch processes.
chp & heat recovery in general could really help the global energy market.
Waste heat from nuclear reactors producing electric power isn't hot enough to power those reactions, except maybe as a preheater.
How would you transport the heat to a haber-borsh reactor? Its not likeyou can just transport it with a couple of copper pipes and some hogh boiling point oil.
@@theterribleanimator1793 There are lots of ways. It could be directly in the chamber, like a cauldron, or it could use the heated fluids like geothermal reactors do. These would be dual-purpose/integrated processes, rather than taking place in separate facilities.
Not only is NP low emission, but has the potential to be much cheaper than oil. It's the free market solution, but regulations are preventing progress!
My grandfather was a chemist who developed this synthetic fuel in WW2. We never had an in depth conversation about it before he died but as I recall he said it was predominantly for V-2 rocket use.
V-2 rockets were fuelled with ordinary alcohol (ethanol - derived from fermenting potatoes), combined with liquid oxygen.
Coal was probably the shortest reason of Germany's ability to continue to war.Germany had vast amounts of hard coal in Silesia and brown coal in Ruhr.Greater Germany including Austria,Czechoslovakia,Alsace Lorraine and some territories of Poland had an amounts of some 500 million tons of coal output per year which was almost on par with USA's volume of production and vastly more than other countries.
Dude they should have just rolled the version back before Man the Guns so they wouldn't have to deal with the new fuel mechanic.
That directly used oil for producing tanks and airplanes and ships and the "production stops after 20 resource dificit" rule still applied, so not having oil was still pretty bad.
@@1Maklak AKCTUALLY
Thank you tik for talking about the economics factors of ww2 most historians have no clue about Economics and your prospective adds a lot to the field of history.
Amazing that despite the dirt cheap oil on international markets, Goering failed by more than a half his target stockpile of the crucial resource.
Goering was an incompetent fool.
South Africa sustained it's economy for fifty years with synthetic oil, from 1948-1994.
I'm betting the synthetic fuel refinery was attached to an atomic power plant
Imagine if the oil in Libya had been discovered in the late 30s.
Man, that would be a interesting scenario for a ucronia. Lybian oil is known to be of high quality, with very low sulfur residues, so it require less refining (this is the short version, it's probably more complicated than this). Fortunately, in our timeline, it was discovered only after the war...
Well, good for the allies!
They just got more oil to win the war!
Why not the axis? You say?
Well, the transport of that oil field to the German mainland would have been nigh impossible do in major part to a increasingly heavy British blockade of German-Italian units in Africa...
The allies would have then realized, due to their amazing spy-rings...that the oil there existed and then exploit the oil and ship it to the Soviet Union to continue to speed up the victory.
For that to happen the Italians would have to not be useless.
That would be a Game changer for Axis...Hitler would've simply conquered Spain & Gibraltar with only 10% of Manpower from Operation Barbarossa...RN/RAF would've Evacuated Medeterian...Rommels Win Africa with unlimited supplies....Barbarossa would've won with More Panzer divisions and unlimited fuel Supplies
It would take decades to put in the necessary infrastructure to extract, refine and store the oil.
Thanks again for making such thorough use of my work. I’d be happy to send you samples of other things I’ve written.
If you read the Oil book "The Prize" then you see that oil prices in the 1930's collapsed also because of the discovery of the Texas Permian basin, a huge reservoir of oil that was so prolific it meant the Texas Railroad Commission stepped in. This had a global impact even though VLCC tankers hadn't yet been built.
"The Prize" by Daniel Yergin has a good summation of the oil situation in WW2.
Thanks. When I heard of synthetic oil I always thought of it going through a lab type process, you know, like in a clean scientific place with beakers, Bunsen burners and the like. Thanks for making the process known, because I had enough trouble reading my Dad's doctoral thesis let alone anyone else's.
This is one of the main reasons why I think now 1942 worse than 1941. Once, when i have seen statistics of the fuel balance of the USSR first time, I also began to realize the danger of the situation in the summer of 1942.
Moreover, it’s not necessary for the Germans to take Baku, it’s enough to hold on and then assemble an air force to attack this oil fields - the Germans were very effectively durin air raids on GAZ plant in series of raids (1943), therefore, from attacks on for stationary, flammable and poorly covered by air defense targets similar effectiveness can be expected.
I'm glad that such an idea will reach the English-speaking audience. Thanks.
Hitler would have been well aware of the issue before barbarossa let alone 1942.
@@evil1143 🤔 Hmmm...I wonder if the German high command's 'war gaming' analysis & predictions included economic scenarios & not just military ones. 🤔
Any discussion of this subject without detailing the involvement of Standard Oil, General Motors, Ethyl Gasoline Corporation ( a joint Standard Oil / GM company) and Dupont, will leave a giant hole in the story. Without the help / involvement of the previously mentioned company's, German production of synthetic fuel, especially for aviation fuel, would have rendered that synthetic fuel practically unusable for military use.
Sure, aaaaaand it was also those corporations that were in large part responsible for the drop in natural oil fuel prices that made that synthetic production impracticable in terms of foreign trade. Would like to point out though that investing tax money in domestic production to avoid being dependent upon foreign trade is not socialist, it's what any sensible government does in any critical sector. Even as peacetime concerns between equal trading partners, every mark spent on imports is one that has to be made up by exports or foreign capital investment, quite aside from the negotiating barrel one is bent over when beholden to foreign production.
Germany had the worlds best Chemists!
@@giupiete6536 You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
@@lotus95t Because Shipping, Chemical, Oil & Engineering companies increasing worldwide access to oil of course had nothing to do with the drop in the worldwide prices for same. Sure. Waiit, were you looking for people to jump on a bandwagon saying the US (& non German industry) was responsible for the Reich's ability to wage war? I've read those before.
@@giupiete6536 You really are stupid. The discussion has nothing to do with the price of oil but of the company's I mentioned supplying tetraethyllead and other patented chemical additives and their formulation to Germany which allowed synthetic fuel to be formulated for use by the German military and especially for aviation fuel, which without the American fuel additives wouldn't have been possible. In fact Dupont was providing the German Air Ministry with tetraethyllead in 1939.
6,000,000 tons! never forget!
The Germans did actually make a coal powered plane !
They tried it but don't think it really worked. Powered coal ram jet.
*Nyyyooooom, CHOO CHOO!*
I know im hella late but a good way to see how desperate they were is (i have heard of it but not researched it) lumber powered tanks
@@edgerlozano9492 They had wood powered tanks, but they were used only for training, you couldn't send those into battle. They did have a diesel powered high altitude spy plane.
@@scratchy996
The Germans had an entire government ministry called the "Ministry of Generators" which was dedicated to supplying plans and equipment to convert civilian, agricultural, and municipal vehicles and applications from liquid fuels go coal/wood gasifiers.
Something to keep in mind is that Stalin agreed to sell oil, food and raw materials to Germany.
But Stalin being no fool... he never sold Hitler *too much* oil... just enough so that Germany could invade France... but NOT enough so that Hitler could squirrel it away for a "Barbarrosa" day.
Somewhere, there is the grave of some unknown and unsung russian economist/statistician. Someone that calculated in 1939~40 how much oil could be *safely* sold for Germany to consume....but not risk them stockpiling it.
He nailed it.🎩
'Pfennig' = German for 'penny', 'hydrogenation' = adding hydrogen to carbon and hydrocarbon molecules to make them into useful alkanes etc. for use as fuel in this case, also used to make margarine.
Rothbard is fine on economics, but a nut job on wider history.
It sounds like the EROEI for synthetic fuel was too low for the Germans to sustain a major war.
TIK is correct when he states standard of living decreases during booms and increases during depression. This is due to Central Banks' interventions in the markets. Prior to the crash on Wall Street, several things played a part in this.
First, England was attempting to return to the gold standard which it ended at the beginning of World War I. Like previous wars, the government decided to return to the same rate as when it stopped. The problem was, the Bank of England had drastically increased the amount of paper Pounds (fiat currency) to pay for the war effort. This caused the purchasing power of the pound to fall significantly lower than it was under the gold standard. The massive increasing in the economy due to the increased printing of fiat money, resulted in inflation of prices. As a result, consumers could buy less for the same amount of Pounds than before the gold standard was ended. (This is how the consumers' standards of living decreases during a boom.) Because there were far too many undervalued paper Pounds in circulation, when the government returned to the gold standard massive amounts of gold began to flow out of the Bank of England. This is because holders of paper Pounds could buy more gold than the Pound notes were worth. As a result of the gold loss, the problem became far worse in England and began to shutter the economy.
Second, Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Branch of the US Federal Reserve, and at the time the de facto "Chairman" of the Fed decided to intervene. (At the time there was no chairman. However, the NY Branch was the largest and most powerful and effectively led Federal Reserve monetary policy.) Strong decided to use several tactics to stem the gold flow from the UK. His primary one was to lower the interest rates. This allows banks to borrow money from the Central Bank cheaper. As a result, paper dollars (fiat currency) flows into the banks and into the markets. The banks drastically increased the amount of loans they offered in an effort to maximize profits from interest on those loans. All the major banks started doing this. The money flowed into the markets without any real controls on what the loans could be used for. Much of this money flowed into Wall Street as borrowers tried to make a quick buck themselves.
Third, the US Treasury added to the inflation by offering to purchased Liberty Bonds at a higher interest rate. This too increased the amount of paper dollars in circulation and decreasing the dollar's purchasing power.
Four, with all this money flowing into the markets, the purchasing power of the paper dollar dropped. This did temporarily help stem the flow of gold from the UK. (Also, Strong purchased Pound notes with US gold causing gold to flow back into the UK.) At this time, the Bank of England lowered its interest rates in an effort to kick start its economy. Gold immediately began flowing out of the U.K. again, causing its economy to further slow and enter into a depression.
Five, despite moderate inflation due to the increased amount of paper dollars, once gold began to flow out of England again, prices began to fall in America. This was due to much of the money which was created going into loans used on the stock market and land and machinery purchases in farms across America. (Let us assume you want to buy a house. You need $5000 to purchase it and need a loan. However, you cannot secure a loan until you put your money in a bank for a while and then qualify for the loan. So you decide to open an account with the $1000 you do have. Under a fractional reserve banking system we currently have and they did then, the banks create new money through loans. If the bank must hold 10% of investments in reserve, and you deposit $1000, the bank can loan out $900 dollars of your money. The original $1000 is now $1900 dollars due to the loan.) As a result of the lower Federal Reserve interest rates, the banks borrowed more money (took loans) from the Fed. This new money was loaned out and flowed into the economy. Much of it was again deposited into the banks and loans out again, increasing the monetary supply and eroding the purchasing power of the dollar. Despite the supposedly booming economy, consumers could purchase less with each dollar. Their standard of living began to decrease.
Six, the Federal Reserve began to worry about the massive increases of the stock market, knowing many of the investments were made with money loaned from banks due to the Federal Reserves own policies. Add to this the collapsing purchasing power of the Pound, Strong began to reverse course and raised interest rate. He was attempting to pull the excess pap dollars from the economy and tighten the availability of credit. This made things worse in the UK and the world in general. As a result, banks needed to pay off their loans to the Fed. The banks started to call in their loans. (Remember that $1000 you put into the bank and the bank could loan out $900, effectively turning $1000 into $1900? Assume the bank did loan out that $900 to another who invested it into the stock market. And also assume that his loan is called. He cashes out his stock and can only pay $500 to the bank. Your original $1000 now is only $600 due to the bad loan.)
Seventh, as more loans are called in, banks begin to pay off their Fed loans. Bankruptcies begin to ripple across the economy, especially in state banks and the farming industry. But money lost to bankruptcies mean less money is returned to bank accounts used to make the loans. To Strong's credit, he was able to remove nearly all the excess paper money he injected into the economy prior to the stock market crash. However, growing numbers of bankruptcies are spreading across the economy. At the same time, the credit markets begin to seize up as banks try to stem the losses due to bad loans. As a result, the number of people investing in the stock market quickly drops. Investors spook and begin selling off stock at the highest prices. The stock market crashes, billions of dollars lost. Companies begin to declare bankruptcies further depleting cash reserves of banks due to loans. Those in the know start to remove their saving from banks just in case the banks reserves are insolvent. Remember, on bank runs, first come, first served. As more people panic, more come to the bank to get their money. (Remember your $1000 deposit which is now only $600 due to a bad loan? You rush the bank. When you finally get to the teller window and pull out your money, the teller hands you the last $400 left in the vault. You have lost $600 and the bank is out of business.) Bank collapses ripple across the country and people lose savings. Markets collapse. Prices begin to collapse as bankruptcies increase and product supply increases.
Eight, people find themselves evicted from houses and farms because the cannot pay off their loans. People lose their jobs as companies collapse. Sales of all products decline as their stocks increase, causing prices to collapse farther. (You are lucky. Though your wages fall, as they would have at the time, you are able to keep your job. And though you lost $600 due to the collapse of your bank, you still have $400. You notice the cheap prices of houses at sheriff's sales as banks are willing to take pennies on the dollars from the few people who still have money to recover whatever money they can to prevent their own collapses. You grab your $400 dollars and head to one on a house you like. Since you are one of the few people with money, you buy the house at auction for $350. The depression has increased your standard of living. This is even more secure because you still have a job.)
This is what happened and still happens. When the US housing market collapsed, the prices of all house fell. Many people who were smart with their money were able to upgrade their houses due to the collapse. Prior to that, they were stuck unable to purchase better housing. Look at Venezuala. The collapsing price of oil and the massive increases in their monetary supply resulted in the hyperinflation they are suffering through now. Look at the stagnant purchasing power of wages despite moderately increasing wages we are currently seeing now, despite a booming economy.
TIK is 100% spot on. I suggest everyone read America's Great Depression to understand the mechanisms he is talking about. It is completely laid out in the book and is germane to this discussion.
Hi TIK, big fan for a while now. Just wanted to say these Q&A style videos are great, particularly in the format they're currently in. I listen to them while playing strategy games, or convert them to mp3 and use as podcasts while driving to work etc. These long historiography type discussion videos that don't require visual attention (as oppose to battlestorm videos with maps and other graphics) are perfect. Keep up the good work!
Re: droping price of oil, wasn't it they have found huge oil fields in Texas and elsewhere so price for oil went down as global supply was much bigger than demand?
That's true, also new oil reserves in Venezuela, Burma, Iran and Saudi Arabia meant there was a glut on the global market.
Yes, but you have to understand that before the 20's, there really wasn't that much of a demand for oil. Almost everything was run on coal, but that's not to say that people didn't know where to find oil. Once the gasoline engine was perfected, and was shown to run much more efficiently, and automobiles became cheap enough for people to actually afford, oil prospectors ALL rushed to start drilling at the same time, thus causing a huge influx of oil production worldwide, not just in the United States.
Contrary to most of the studies, the fuel supply was tight for most of the the war, but it was not critical until the US bombing campaign switched to the oil plants thanks to an spy ring run out of Sweden that fed detailed information to the Allies about what facilities were critical. Once the bombs found the right targets it started an oil collapse they never recovered from.
The real problem with the synthetic fuels is the huge energy costs. And the fact that their process was incredibly dirty. The minerals and other contaminants in the low grade coal in German hands made the process wretchedly complex. I speak from some experience with working with synthetics and the newest processes have far higher yields.
Do you have a source for this Swedish spy ring? It's fascinating to learn more!
Here are a few interesting/fun things about oil, diesel, avgas, and gasoline you might not know:
- Germany problem is thermodynamics. If it wants fuel from coal, it need coal to run electricity generators to run conversion plants. that's expensive, but do able.
- They have a shelf life. The lighter the distillation fraction they came from, the shorter the shelf life. For example: gasoline is the lightest and most volatile and its shelf life is about 3 months. Avgas and diesel is more stable and most will last only a year or so. Wars are rare, only once or so per one or two generations. This makes stockpiling ready fuel incredibly difficult. So if you want a war with any kind of endurance at all, you will need big stockpile of crude oil and refineries ready to ramp up the fuel supplies. These facilities are also essentially state-owned/funded/subsidised and cut off from the market.
- Viewing from this lens, the synthetic fuel from coal can be a strategic resource since coal last essentially forever and even longer shelf life than crude oil. If all you have is coal and oil need to be imported; imports can be cut but coal + coal conversion plants + coal fired electricity generation, you can get enough fuel for some limited operation. Germany's problem is really a case of biting off more than they could chew. That setup will be perfectly viable for advance through well railroaded regions where supplies strain can be alleviated somewhat with coal-fired rail transports. Once they are not on rail country and had to use trucks; that's it.
- One proposal from Wesley Clark, US. General for a strategy to make America energy independent was to ... holy shit, turn coal into liquid fuel. Well, that needs electricity. If you already have electricity, why not run cars on batteries? the only thing that is cannot be run with batteries are jet-powered aircrafts. So use the fuel to do that. America is already the largest oil production country in the world right now.
Thanks for your post. That's some really interesting stuff right there.
The burden of electrical power could have been over come with dam building or even using coal. The Germans possessed an abundance of the stuff
@@Stormbringer2012 Not really, they had a coal shortage trying to solve their oil shortage.
Excellent post. I have wondered about the synthetic oil issue and you have cleared up most of my questions here. A few details that are not really huge but still might be useful to you: One German fighter pilot reported that he switched to night fighter duty in 1943. There was a training program for day fighter pilots to switch to night fighting. It was designed to take 90 days. Due to fuel shortages in 1943, it took nine months. Another detail: One major expense of coal gasification was steel. The methods at that time took a very large number of steel vessels--to the point that the entire supply of steel in the 3rd Reich simply could not supply enough. Finally, I recently read that while the jet engines could burn many fuels, the best fuel available was synthetic. The engines could burn diesel fuel but with less efficiency. In a pinch they could burn gasoline, but with significantly reduced efficiency.Thanks again,Jay Maupin
One could easily argue that the low margins in the stock market ($1 could buy $10 of stock) was to blame. EVERYONE was buying leveraged stocks and when the first bump happened everyone started calling in the margins and the free flow of capital suddenly stopped.
That makes perfect sense in peacetime markets, but once Barbarrossa failed, Germany was locked into a fight to the death against the U.S.S.R. . Given the stakes, why would prices, stocks, debt & deficits matter to Hitler & the O.K.C.? The only reason I can come up with iss that Germany still needed to purchase or trade for coal & minerals from Sweden, Finland & Norway, so it was necessary to have the German currency worth something. Otherwise, I don't understand why Germany vdidn't ignore the costs, upgrade/expand Romanian oil production facilities & produce as much natural & synthetic oil asxpossible. .
the problem is that instead of focusing on producing synthetic oil, hitler wasted valuable resources on obsolete things like:
1. the Atlantic wall, which in many areas was more of a propaganda piece than really a defensive position, as the German machine guns took far more lives than those cannons etc that surrendered without firing.
2. the bomb v1 and v2, a waste that by itself, already made the Germans lose the war.
3. Holocaust logistics and resources
4. gustav cannon etc
5.The cover of the soldiers' water container was aluminum, and the gas mask case was iron, that's for more than 10,000,000 soldiers
.6 Allied bombing was not prioritized, instead hitler continued with plans for the horten, arado, flying lighter; they did not even centralize the factories so that the luftwaff could protect them, instead of having to disperse the luftwaff throughout the erope, dividing the perimeter into many barriers and weakening their defensive capabilities
.7 he wasted resources on a surface navy that couldn't be finished, instead of uboats from the start
.
the list of resources wasted is much longer, that and much more could have generated more synthetic fuel, making the luftwaff have no fuel to train pilots and defend factories. how many factories were destroyed by the mismanagement of resources.
Hitler didn't even try to take over the Mediterranean oil wells after the fall of the france. And since the ussr could withdraw and cut off the gas supply at any time, the idea of focusing every resource on synthetic gasoline was no mystery.
And it only declared total war in 42 to 43, when the United Kingdom had already taken drastic measures since 41, the same Red Army and in the USA, drastic measures were taken, while the Germans tried to disassociate with v1 and v2, tigers etc etc.
sorry for my english, it's not my language, but i'm trying
Chris Rea did a song about this 'Fuel if you think it's over.'.
@TIK Putting my Chemist's hat on: the Germans went down the WRONG road WRT coal to liquids. They adopted HIGH PRESSURE conversion technology. This was an EPIC error. High Pressure tanks used exotic steels that Germany was short of. That was the hang-up. That's why coal-to-liquid was so expensive. It was the STEEL. This is the same steel that you needed for your tanks, submarines, surface fleet -- etc.
The Correct solution was to use the LOW Pressure path. This is nothing more exotic than pure distillation to produce 'Coal Tars' -- BTW, a British technology that was more than a century old. The Americans perfected it by the 1920s -- and had patents issued. It, the American solution, was NOT a secret. It just didn't appeal to German chemists. They over designed their path to liquids.
In the Low Pressure scheme, coal is distilled -- and the waste is not converted into liquids. It is merely shifted over to thermo-electric power plants and BURNED as is. This was an economic revolution -- if seized. In the 19th Century there was no-one to purchase the waste coal solids -- but the electric power industry changed that equation.
Mere distillation produces one-barrel of liquids for each ton of coal. Germany was mining millions of tons of coal per year.
The octane rating of distilled coal tar is virtually certain to be higher than the crap the Nazis were cranking out.
The High Pressure route to liquids has never pencilled out for anybody.
Interesting video ! Also FWIW its pronounced hyd-ro-genation , which is just the process of adding hydrogen atoms to carbon-carbon bonds in an unsaturated compound. Keep up the good work !
I am impressed that you quite Murray Rothbard, one of most incisive economists that ever lived.
Awesome to realize TIK has released another video.
Well TIK, I'm proud to say that you are the first channel I've become a patreon for!
Thankfully, Military history not visualized went into deeper depth of the messed up logistics that did not help the Reich in basic transport of well....literally anything to either civilians or its soldiers. Also interestingly like you he mentioned they had plenty of coal, but that they had neither the manpower or even modernized tools (or the ability to continuously modernize) to make up the lost production for their needs. Well at least we can learn from our enemy's mistakes.
Another problem was over engineering. Panther bearings where being made to last thirty years, when the tanks themselves would be lucky to last thirty days in some instances.
There was plenty of labour. Work it out! They wouldn't or couldn't feed them.
Well they had actually a decent manpower.
Incredible thansk for the reference to Anand Toprani's work. Breathtaking !
Oooo I just finished Vampire Economy so I know this one :)
(I won't spoil it)
Gri sha
BBC
You should go with Hitler's beneficiaries now.
Nice video From TIK about Axis Shortage of Oil during 2WW ...Excellent explaining of that disaster situation
According to Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles, synthetic oil also had fewer aromatic compounds, which are needed for production of the highest quality fuels.
Not for 'highest quality' so as to speak, but to raise the octane rating of the fuel.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
That's the process used in the Alberta Tar Sands, the Bitumen is extracted from the Sand using steam injection, this Bituman is then infused with hydrocarbons extracted from the abundant Natural Gas.
That is what makes it *Synthetic* fuel/Oil.
With modern thermal and catalytic cracking, polymerization, hydrogenation, isomerization, and alkylation technologies, the point is totally moot. You can synthesize any octane booster you want. The Germans probably didn't have that much technology though.
@@tommyodonovan3883 Yes, and the point is that, with WW2 Chemical Engineering technology, synthetic fuels were not as good as natural fuels.
You want branched molecules rather than aromatics. Aromatics must be kept to a reasonable minimum as they coke up during consumption and create some dioxin emissions which are fairly harmful. That’s why some refineries actually have benzene saturation units to meet the modern gasoline spec. The point is valid though, as Fischer Tropsch produces mainly linear molecules so the synthetic crude must be processed further to increase the number of branched hydrocarbons. It’s not a major cost though.
Thanks Tik, you’re the first person I’ve heard explain what synthetic oil was made from.
Sometimes things are very simple. German soldier said: we knew we could not win, even before we got near Moscow. As my mother said: what are you going to do? Walk all the way to Siberia?"
@The Nova renaissancei know that. However,, there are not enough Germans to hold even a part of that territory. And any normal person could see that. Just another proof that all generals and politicians are psychopaths.
I worked as a chemist in the 80's (fuel crisis) on a synthetic fuel plant in the UK (at a major UK oil company) using German/South African technology from that era and it is very inefficient and required rare earth elements to make the catalyst from parts of the world under Allied control. It was a good experiment and we made from Avgas to Waxes. The modern technology is there but has been deliberately shelved for obvious geopolitical reasons.
Rai Karklins obvious reasons like what?
@@altaiaurelius if you are an oil company why would you compete with yourself at much more expensive price, we can make synthetic oil, the global economy relies on the petro dollar and is happy fighting wars over it.
Rai Karklins So perhaps governments could be the ones to lead the research on how to more efficiently produce synthetic fuel from corn/ethanol or nuclear energy? The global economy and its power players are terrifying when I read your account of this.
@@altaiaurelius there already is good enzyme technology for converting waste cellulose into ethanol. Just like with all renewable energy it is up against the military industrial complex Eisenhower predicted. The world economy thrives off wars in case you had not noticed. There is also technology to run cars of hydrogen using solar to split water, very simple, but resisted like crazy (honda).
@@altaiaurelius Pleny of oil maybe/
A defecit also build up over time for as long as the war go on. If you start with to little of a resource, this problem will get much worse for as long as you dont get a product to cover for the need. Reserves will be depleted, missions and operations gets canned - and all this serve to build up a strategic weakness that will accelerate until the war is over. This goes fpr any conflict - be it armed, a trade war etcetera. And it can be applied to anything of strategic value.
A lot of the comments rightfully focus on the poor conversion efficiency of synthetic oil production, but it’s worth remembering that coal to liquids produces a synthetic crude that is mostly converted into final products without much further loss. Refining at the time was mostly topping refineries that converted perhaps 50-70% of the feedstock crude oil into light and medium refined products, with the rest being heavy heating oil, residue and refinery light gases used for internal power generation.
Generally the major stumbling block is the sheer capital required to build the plants to produce synthetic fuel products. Much like EU is finding out with its green policies, even subsidised economics can only get you so far.
Reminder that the Sudetenland is rightful Zimbabwean clay 🇿🇼
Zimbabwe je serbska
What.
@@knockhello2604 Serbia is rightful Serbian clay.
Knock Hello You read that right
@@mrniceguy7168 ha funny meme 7th grader
German coal production in 1940 was 130 million tons, if it takes 22 tons to make a ton of oil that's about 6 million tons of oil, oil requirements for Axis controlled Europe, according to the video was 20 million tons, even if only 4.5 tons are needed to make a ton of oil the cost in coal to make the required oil is huge; coal is also required for steel production, electricity etc., other things essential to make the economy work and ensure the armies can be supplied. Oil is not easily substituted by coal.
German coal production was much more than 130 million with also lignites.They produced 277 million ton in 1914 with lignites(154 hard coal,coke and other types and 123 million tons of lignites).
@@AFT_05G Yes, reading some sources state a figure for coal and include in that 'brown coal' (lignites) or just coal, either way it takes a lot of effort by coal miners and in processing to replace oil with coal.
And yet the Afrika Korp was sitting on top of the Libya's oil fields !
I'm happy that I spend my time watching you , so rich content , you 're genius man , so proud of your hardwork ! 👍🏻
TLDR: It's super inefficient to make synthetic oil. They did it, but it just ultimately wasn't viable as a solution in the quantities that they needed it.
Toprani is no chemist. The problem was that Germany's chemists fell in love with a HIGH PRESSURE process. This is where the money went. It, their process, required the most expensive steels and a LOT of compressor power. (electricity and super-scale motors) Stumping up the money was never the issue. Just building the plants was a killer.
Germany could've gone with the ancient (British) process of straight distillation. That required 19th Century technology -- and ordinary steels. The char residue could then have been utilized as boiler feed all over the German economy. They simply BLEW IT.
Can you explain further? Are you saying this 19th century method could produce oil out of coal? I only thought oil could be distilled.
@@solarfreak1107 The 19th Century folks called the distilled product coal-oil. You'll hear such references in many a Hollywood 'period' film. Petroleum based oil was the minor fraction of production until Rockefeller standardized refining in Ohio. Hence his brand: Standard (standardized) Oil.
[He made his breakthrough with kerosene that had no gasoline vapors in it.]
The destructive distillation of coal to produce coke for blast furnaces is a huge business even today. However, the coals used are chosen for their properties in iron reduction: low sulfur, low phosphorous.
For the Nazis, the play was to destructively distill 'steam coal' - the stuff that the Red Chinese and Indians have run short of. This process does not produce sweet coke -- but it does release far, far more volatiles -- which when condensed -- become very, very light 'crude oil' -- also termed 'gas oil' as it is a liquid recovered from hot gassified vapors by the process.
The kicker for the Nazis was that such an industrial process does not require exotic, high quality steels. It does not involve really high pressures.
It was not viable once cheap petroleum became widely available -- especially after Spindle top in Texas. (1903)
But, until then, coal distillation condensate dominated the fuel liquids market.
Before steam turbine driven alternators, the waste coke from said distillation was a drug on the market. But by 1935, the Krauts were in a position to partner up every distillation plant with a plain vanilla steam power plant -- of which the Nazis needed no end of.
THAT was their play -- and they blew it. The Nazis were destined to lose the war -- no matter what they did. But with coal oil, they would've had a route to far more liquid fuels at a practical cost. Thank the heavens that the Nazis were technical dolts.
BTW, a single ton of steam coal figures to emit about 1.3 barrels of coal oil condensate... IF you're using lighter, wetter thermal coal. At worst, you're looking at 1 barrel per ton. Nazi Germany was mining millions of tons per year -- over 300,000 tons per day...(adding in the occupied nations.) Scaling up to 100,000 bbl per day might have been possible. Then the Nazi fuel crisis would be over.
*Sees TIK notification*
*Gives resigned sigh and clicks*
It's a reflex at this point. I have no voluntary control anymore...
Wow you clicked on the video... why do people insist on posting the same stupid garbage memes?
@@MetricImperialist You must be new to RUclips.
@@82dorrin I've been here a lot longer than you zoomer. The comments section used to be pure cancer but still fun. Somehow you morons managed to make it even worse with your unoriginal low-IQ spam.
Why are you phishing for likes anyway? This isn't reddit. The internet was better without you scrubs.
@@MetricImperialist but... Is this really the case.. :v?
@@loneeagle901 Yes. It's an unoriginal comment, they're everywhere. It's a slight variation of the 'I'm a simple man, I see the video, I click' meme.
If people weren't allowed to 'like' comments, all this dumbass spam would disappear immediately.
Since the "cost" of converting coal into oil is mainly in that it takes a lot of coal and time to do, and Germany was perfectly willing to burn through lots of its huge coal supplies to do this, the real issue was not the cost-inefficiency of the process (which was irrelevant to Germany, since it was at war and had lots of coal), but that they simply hadn't created ENOUGH infrastructure for the conversion process to create nearly enough oil to cover its needs. Now, maybe it was simply impossible for it to do so in the time that it had. But that was the crux of the problem, really. Germany created its own problems by going to war when it did.
My uncle who was a Tanker in WWII remarked years ago about how they captured Luftwaffe airfields at the end of the war with rows of brand new planes sitting together, with no fuel or pilots. The troops knew in 1944/45 that the Nazis were out of gas, literally. The Nazis lost the war on Dec. 11, 1941.
With declaring war on World’s strongest economy and industrial power...
Too many pilots were lost, takes time to train them!
@UCbVaC1do_vc9IH9tkdUgFfQ (1) If you said that About the URSS you are a 1diot. (2) If you are refering to the USA, Germany no declared war in USA, USA declared war on Germany, Hitler just made it de jure.
Agree. One author thinks that Germany lost the war with the fall of France. Hitler, after that, never doubted his strategic planning decisions.
I still think the best book on the subject is wages of destruction.
It explained that synthetic petrol was very expensive, and they didn't have enough facilities.
Also despite plentiful coal supplies, the Nazi empire had a major coal shortage. The book said that with better management, that was one of the shortages that could have been solved.
Kinda ironic. In trying to solve their oil shortage, they had a coal shortage instead.
Funnily enough, the Italians were sitting on a sea of oil in Libya. The Axis could have used it.
Were they able to dig for the oil though? Wasn't it too deep for technology at that time?
It had not been "developed" or "produced" though. It was still deep underground.
I’m not sure, but I imagine that they could have accessed it if they’d started early enough. It would still take a few years to build the infrastructure (roads, rail systems, ports), refineries and technology necessary. An Italian geologist and cartographer named Arditi Desio found oil in the 1930’s.
I’m not sure that it was to deep. Libya managed to drill it about a decade later with far less money, resources and technical expertise. I agree that it would take a few years to build the infrastructure and equipment necessary to pump commercial amounts of it though.
They would have to have shipped that oil back to Europe for processing. Which required more fuel that the italian navy didn't have, hence their navy staying in port for long periods of time.
South Africa had a similiar situation as germany during aparthied. That is why the state owned company Sasol is an expert in the technology of converting coal into oil.
How much of a factor was the shale oil production in Austria, France and elsewhere. This form of oil production had been about for almost 100 years and was quite developed as a process by the 1930s/40s.
Elsewhere includes Estonia. Shale oil production was one reason why Hitler insisted on trying to hold the Baltic states in 1944 long after his strategic position there was viable.
Sourses or refs for this????? Guess not
@@m2heavyindustries378 yeh the big heaps/hills off shale piled outside the village i live in. ever been to central scotland. or you could just google it. ruclips.net/video/HN3dBhiP3O4/видео.html
@@TheClanAdventures I didn't know that interesting
For your question in this video asking if the US or Venezuela was the worlds largest oil producer, the answer is the USA by a large amount. The US produced 180 million metric tons of oil in 1940. The next largest was Venezuela at 30 million MT followed by the USSR with 27 million MT of oil. After that ranks 4 and 5 were Iran and Indonesia with around 8 million MT per year.
I think you dropped several zeros. A large oil tanker would carry 10,000 tons.
@@robg9236 Sorry you are correct. I meant to put million at the end of each number. I'll edit my post thanks for pointing that out.
Yeah why? Synthetic oil’s supposed to last 10,000 miles - enough to Baku.
The US Lend Lease provided 25% of the food required by Soviet Union during the war. The Russian word for Spam is "Spam".
Great take on the oil issue.
But you missed the mark on the economic concepts in the 20's.
Whenever TIK veers away from discussing battles, oil and food, he goes off the deep end and says a bunch of nonsense.
FischerTropsch process chemical engineers were brought to the US under project Paperclip, and plants were made in the US in the 1950s. Cheap oil made that process inefficient in the US too.
Japan literally went to war over oil as well. At the same time that Japan was screaming for oil, the US was using oil on its runways to keep the dust down. The Battle of the Bulge was also about capturing Allied fuel depots, as it did not have enough oil to continue the drive to split the Allies in two. Joachim Piper's plan to spearhead the assault was initially deemed as too risky to succeed. But his odds of success were greater than the overall battle plan, so Piper was allowed to proceed, and represented the greatest thrust into Allied lines. The Germans only had about a thousand tanks for the winter offensive, but it was the lack of fuel more than Allied resistance that eventually stopped them. And Piper was eventually forced to abandon his equipment and march back to Germany, along with his remaining men.
I don't agree at all that it was a lack of fuel rather then Allied resistance that stopped the German winter offensive in 1944. The Germans won the first few battles during that offensive when they were attacking green units not expecting to be hit with a major German offensive. But once the Germans started fighting more experienced US units the US units held the Germans back from advancing any further. The battle for Bastogne where the 101st Airborne and 10 Armored divisions is given a ton of attention during the battle of the Bulge that they rightfully deserve for greatly delaying the German attack plans but the US divisions outside of the bulge did just as much to hold the Germans in and prevent them from completing their goals. The Germans still had the fuel to move their armored units around even at the end of the battle when they started pulling the remainder of their armored units back to their starting line. And then also right from the start of the battle the US units prevented the Germans from taking many of the roads they wanted to use during their initial plans for the Winter offensive.
Piper was not the furthest Panzer advance, it was the 2nd Panzer and there advance was blocked by Monty moving the Third Army Group to stop them at the Meuse.
@@benwilson6145 I'm not sure what you are talking about there. There was no such thing as a 3rd Army group. The 21st Army Group was the most Northern Allied Army Group commanded by Monty which had the British 2nd army and Canadian 1st army in it and sometimes the US 9th army like during the Battle of the Bulge. Then there was the 12th Army group commanded by Omar Bradly which was made up of all US armies. South of that was the 6th Army group which was made up of US and French armies. And then in Italy was the 15th Army group which had a US and "British" army (the 8th army at this point was more made up of more international divisions then it was British divisions at this point) in it.
When the Germans attacked it split the US 1st and 9th army off from 12th Army group HQ so Eisenhower put them under Monty's 21st army group. The US 1st and 9th armies held the north half of the bulge while Patton and the US 3rd army counter attacked from the South. Also the US 1st and 9th armies had already begun their counterattack from the North before they were put under Monty's command. Montgomery has been given a lot of criticism for what he said after the Battle of Bulge because he made it seem like in his post battle press conference that he saved the day when the US generals and their armies were already counterattacking before being put under his command. And the main counter attack by the US 3rd Army was not under Monty's command at all. Monty then had to issue a apology after this press conference and Churchill found it necessary in a speech to Parliament to explicitly state that the Battle of the Bulge was purely an American victory (Even though British troops did fight in the battle a bit). It would be like saying that the Battle of El Alamein was partially a American victory because some American fighters and bombers took part in the battle.
@@PhillyPhanVinny Sorry got the group wrong, it was the British 30 Corp (Guards Armored, 43rd, 51st and 53rd Divisions under General Horrocks).
The Germans were getting oil from Venezuela via neutral Spain, they were even refueling U Boats of the African coast from the S. American tankers. The Wall St. bankers knew all about it. The Germans were using an older method of coal/oil conversion. The Americans had developed the Karrick method in the 1920's that was more efficient than the Nazi German Bergius process.
Hmmm I wonder where they got the patents and know-how for synthetic oil? (Definitely don't read Antony Sutton to find out)
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, these days known as DAAD.
The hydrocarbons synthesis process is also known as the Fischer-Tropsch process. The number of sch's should give you a clue on where it was invented.
its the Germans, they pretty much invented half of chemistry
and physics
Standard oil cartel with IG faenen?
Germans invented both the Bergius process, referred to here as direct hydrogenation of coal, and the Fischer-Tropsch process, the creation of synthetic crude from classified coal (or biomass or garbage).
Excellent analysis TIK
Hi Tik,
I am a big fan of your videos! Albert Speer also mentions the synthetic oil situation in his book Inside The Third Reich.
I love how you connected history with economics. As an economist i see all fucking wars in world history happen because economics and demographics
3:50 - Hy-droj-eh-nay-shun
Also, pfennig is 1/100 of a mark. I'm guessing it's like the penny
For people who don't understand the critical flaw of the synthetic oil argument, being forced to mine 4.5-22 times the amount of coal you need to produce a unit of oil also require that order of magnitude of logistical capacity and investment and construction of infrastructure and industry to support it. Not to mention that the country already was using a lot of the existing capacity to FIGHT A WAR. I just don't see this happening in any alternate reality.
Hence the vast quantities of horses used. Cars being towed by horses LOL
The first war used an immense ammount of horses mules and bullock's, managed to kill 20M men just the same. Only 20 odd years seperated them.
Hey @TIK, any plans on covering German on-soil oil production? I have lived in the city of Celle, which is basically THE German oil town. Now just recently while doing some digging on German oil production in WW2 for a HoI4 mod I came across the remains of the attempts of the Nazis to increase oil production from the fields here in the 1940s. Apparently these plans only died in 1945 and were continued for some time in the 1950s, but never took off. Some of the buildings remain in a forested area around 25km from here. Currently it isn't financially sound to try to extract said oil, but apparently the deposits are quite large (compared to what we have here in other areas, North Sea not included).
BTW the whole area was the main German fuel production center during WW1 and up to WW2. It covered the largest part of the civilian requirements pre-WW2. If you need any help if you ever want to cover this feel free to drop me a mail, I have some contacts to the official district historians.
You'll want to take a look at Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction". He goes in depth about the food, energy and steel issues the 3rd Reich faced.
Excellent book. Covers this well.
Most surprising part of that book was when he mentioned Germany having a coal shortage. I thought that was insane.
If Hitler hadn't invaded Leningrad, than he could have negotiated for oil access to the East.
See notification for new TIK video, grabs iPad and hides from wife and kids
Why?
USSBS is a good source too for analysing both branches of German war economy.
Rothbard was a great economist, great to see you read his books
Unfortunately, I've only recently managed to get to him. The Marxists kept criticizing me for reading Rothbard when I wasn't, so I just had to comply to the collective and start reading him
Read Von Mises too. Should trigger a few folks
TIK and Libertertarian rants, name a more iconic duo
Tooze covers the German economy in WW2, including synthetic fuel and rubber production, in "Wages of Destruction".
That will be the book that states that Bomber Harris really pissed on Speer's cornflakes.
@@richardvernon317
Yep. Battle of The Ruhr (1943).
Haha, it's ironic that trying to solve their shortage of oil, they then had a shortage of coal.
A few years ago Germany banned nuclear power. Coal has made a comeback just proving how reliant it still is on it.
Hi TIK. As per your request. I found "The Prize" by Daniel Yergin a great source of information.
Thank you!
@@TheImperatorKnight Gerne doch. Ist echt ein super Buch. zBsp geht er auch ziemlich ins Detail betreffend der japanischen Versuche synthetische Treibstoffe herzustellen.
Ironic they didn't realize in 1942 they were sitting on a literal ocean of oil in Libya.
Or Italian pre WWI (and later) after they captured Libya from Ottoman.
Kevin Dragos, the RAF bomber command, the 8th and 15th air force was bombing all oil facilities
Yes but they missed mostly! So they aimed for workers housing!
@@mikefay5698 Not in 1944-1945 they didn't. The RAF got about 18% of bombs aimed at the Oil plants within the grounds of the factory in all weathers between June 1944 and the end of the war in all weathers. The USAAF effort was weather dependant during the same period, but a figure of 26% was normal in very good weather, down to 5% if they bombed on H2X radar. 80% of the time they had do bomb on radar fixes. The de-housing plan, which wasn't the RAF's idea, but that of Churchill's Science Adviser Lindermann and was only policy from February 1942 to January 1943 when it was superseded by the Combined Bomber Offensive policy. The 1942 policy was driven by the fact that the new GEE navigation system was only accurate to plus or minus 5 miles at maximum range and to overwhelm the air defences a bomber stream had to be used which mean the aircraft didn't have time to piss about trying to ID a specific target (which in most cases they couldn't see even with air dropped flares due to weather or industrial haze (Smog). Bomber Command's main issue was 50% of their bombs landed in open country. This was because of an effect known as Creep back. As the raid progressed, the bombers at the middle and rear of the stream tended to drop their loads short. The net result was the bomb plot tended to be up to 4 miles long from were the first bombs (and target markers) landed and the last bombs. Bomber Command's misson in 1943 was to destroy a twon or city as an economic entity by taking out all of the things in it that allow it to operate. I.E. The Power Station, The Gas Works, The Water Works, the mains distribution system that gets the Electricity, Gas and water from where it is made to where it is needed. The Coal yards, the Railway network, the Tram and Buses, the Canal's, plus the smaller industry which is dual hatted in that they make sub components for the weapons, as well as stuff for civilian use. All of these assest tent to be dotted all around the towns and cities and not just in one corner of them. Oh and you kill the workers (which in the UK are children, women and old men). Kids like my Father who helped make aircraft parts with my Grandfather in a shed in north east London in 1943/44.
Small hint: The aviation fuel especially for fast fighters was the biggest problem as this needed to be also the best quality and iirc could not be made from synthetic fuel.. the Japanese had it even worse btw
'Why didn't synthetic oil solve the axis oil crisis?'
Me: Thermodynamics!
Okay, I'll shut up and watch the video now.
(Ed sp)
it was the fault of mad man Hitler
Thermodynamically corret.
One of the best types of correct.
Limited resources and the law of diminishing returns sums it up.
Thermodynamics isn't terrible by some standards. According to one scientist after the war, on average it took about 1 ton of coal to synthesize 1 barrel of oil- about 7 times less. Assuming that's the lignite Germany usually used as feedstock, then it would have about 1/3 the energy density of its mass in oil. This would mean Germany was putting in 7 tons of coal for the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal, or about 40% thermal efficiency.
www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080327_RL34133_5320447491700d8c35c78624a956317f1baa8401.pdf (pages 8 and 16)
At the same time, a diesel locomotive in WW2 had about 30% thermal efficiency (page 22 below):
utahrails.net/pdf/EMD_567_History_and_Development_1951.pdf
So the total thermal efficiency of a diesel locomotive in WW2 running on coal converted to synthetic oil is about 12%.
Meanwhile, the very good steam locomotives had 6% thermal efficiency in WW2- the most efficient steam locomotive ever built had 12% efficiency (built by André Chapelon):
www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Railroads/Railroad_Costs.htm (Data on the Big Boy taken from Kratville's book; it calculates to about 6% efficiency if coal was bituminous).
So synthetic oil isn't always bad in thermodynamic terms- it looks good compared to a 6% efficient steam locomotive.
@@THX-zk3qq It's not really that, it's more of the fact that Germany is using one critical resource to convert into another critical resource. You can't produce steel without coal.
Ja! I arrived first. We need more TIK material. Great work man!!!
Something I always find interesting in regards to oil and lend lease in WW2 was that the US supplied the USSR with the majority of it's oil used for their air force. Apparently the oil produced in the USSR was not good for aircraft so the USSR was sent oil from the US to use on their aircraft.
I would suspect that its not the oil, its the refineries that would be the problem, its how /what the refinery is set up to produce.
@@benwilson6145 Yeah that could be it. It is possible that different oil is taken out of the ground in different locations as well I guess. I'm no expert on oil or what type of oil is best to use where. I just know that the USSR used a bunch of oil from the US for their planes.
@@PhillyPhanVinny Oil from the ground wasn't the issue, it's just that the Soviet petrochemical industry at the time wasn't able to produce the additives needed to create 100/130/150 octane aviation gasoline in the quantities needed.
@@hailexiao2770 Gotcha, thank you for confirming that is what the issue was.
After 1935 it took 2 and 1/2 Marks to buy 1 US Dollar. 100 Pfenigs to the Mark. About 12 Marks to buy a Pound. That 1938 Dollar is about $18.75 today. So a 1938 Mark is equivalent to almost 47 Marks today. That is inflation at work. Until the 1970s oil traded for about $20 per barrel or one barrel per ounce of gold. Roughly it took an ounce of gold to buy a barrel of oil, that is the foreign exchange problem and here a better value of oil.
People's Veto did a good recent video on the gauging whether the Germans could have gone South to get the oil, via Turkey. Worth a look folks.
He changed his name back to The Alternative Hypothesis
I saw it too,it was fucking retarded
If you sit at home and don´t care to check the terrain there..
Thanks for the link, Aquila. Far better than listening to this twaddle.
@@Br1cht or actually see the economic and infrastructure situation of the middle east and spain. That dude was the pinnacle of an armchair general
Germany was looking into using jet engines running on powdered coal late in the War. A few designs had proceeded to the Drawing board stage.