AHC: reduce 1930s-1940s German need for petrol

Horses was my first thought too, but I went with wood because I thought it would be cooler.

Keeping oil trade routes open is a good idea too, but of course the problem is that here is who makes oil in 1940:

1. United States - 183 million barrels
2. Soviet Union - 30 million barrels
3. Venezuela - 27 million barrels
4. Iran - 10 million barrels
5. Dutch East Indies - 8 million barrels
6. Mexico - 7 million barrels
7. Romania - 6 million barrels

I don't see a lot of friends of Germany on that list. And it goes down fast after that.

http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/league/le0280ah.pdf, p. 6.

Hence why I'm increasingly wondering if this notion of tripling German vehicle production is actually a realistic proposition.
just means have to think outside the box and expand! ;) ( wait.. they tried that.. .. hrmm.. okay.. maybe they should have tried the BFF approach instead )
 
Easy peasy.

When Hitler comes to power, his big public-works project is the reconstruction of Germany's railroads, then suffering from years of underinvestment and deferred maintenance.

This instead of the Autobahns, which were very showy and modernistic. But Germany had neither the oil supply nor the motor vehicle fleet to make full use of the Autobahns.

I have seen an argument that the continued neglect of the railroads in favor of the Autobahns ultimately had a crippling effect on Germany's war effort. And that in fact, the first major users of the Autobahns were the invading American and British armies.

So the PoD is that Hitler and his circle turn down the Autobahn proposal, and listen to the railroad managers instead. This is somewhat odds-on, as the Autobahns fit nicely into the Nazi image, whereas railroads were old and boring. But it could have happened - Nazi "planning" was often erratic.

With no Autobahns and better rail service, there is less domestic demand for gasoline.

Probably not what the OP wanted, but it meets the requirement.
 
Last edited:
What might be the realistic synthetic fuel production, were that pursued from 1934?

I think I know the answer but want to hear some new opinions.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
Different Hitler-Stalin treaty - when modifying the original text, instead of swapping the middle Vistula-Bug area for Lithuania, exchange it for east Galicia instead. Makes a lovely salient to cut off in 1941, BTW ...
East Galicia equals at least 500K tons a year. 3,5M barrels, or so an online coverter tells me.
Not bombing and setting them on fire in September would help too ...
 
In short i’d say rails > waterways > autobahns.
Massive investments in coal/Wood fired steam tractors and trucks.
Not ethanol, food is what Germany had less off than Oil. More tractors would help here.
Also in the navy, a few ship categories would be sailing all the time (minesweepers, defensive minelayers, some escorts). Use coal for them.
Dont forget to expand coal production.
 
If oil is a major weakness for Germany, then simplifying vehicle production so you can have more tanks just makes the problem worse. Getting rid of tanks .... Well, you can't. Relying on horses... They already do. I think they're stuck. Whatever efficiencies you can play around with in engine design will at best only affect new manufacturing, introduce a whole host of new logistics and maintenance problems to do with servicing yet more types of engines in the field, and even then will only be shaving off consumption around the margins.

And with the numbers I just put in my post above this one, it's clear that there isn't exactly an easy route out of the oil problem for Germany strategically. The only obvious route I can see is to invade the Soviet Union.

Here's a bright idea for free: don't start wars with enemies who make almost all of the world's supply of a strategic resource you need to fuel your war machine.
Well, unless you can seize it which they almost did in '42.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas ... maybe tanks would not be first choice of vehicles to convert

believe for navy at least the smaller ships needed to be coal fired (not including the S-Boats)

In Finland, the great majority of all non-military motor vehicles ran on wood gas during the Continuation War, as gasoline was reserved to military and official use only. Without the possibility to use wood gas systems, the Finnish war effort would have ground to a halt due to a lack of fuel.

Arguably, Germany should have been able to utilize wood (etc) gas systems on the home front much more than it did, considering what Finland managed to do with much smaller resources and industrial base. But then of course Finland had comparatively massive amounts of wood to use for fuel - in Germany the availability of wood was not nearly as good and the whole system of producing and distributing woodchips, etc, would have taken a lot more work to create and run than in Finland.
 
Last edited:
But then of course Finland had comparatively massive amounts of wood to use for fuel - in Germany the availability of wood was not nearly as good and the whole system of producing and distributing woodchips would have taken a lot more work to create abnd run than in Finland.

Coal is far better than wood for creating producer gas, so they are covered there on that front, use the brown coal for that, as it's not so great for other uses.
 
One wartime publication suggested planting the wonder-crop that does everything: Die Lustige Hanffibel. Loosely translated, that's "The Humorous Hemp Handbook." Apparently, hemp can be used to make biodiesel and ethanol. Here's the cover, complete with contented, smiling anthropomorphic Nazi Cannabis sp. plants:

upload_2018-1-14_14-42-23.png


I can't find any of the specific data right now, but Germany had an intricate system of surpluses and deficits in its agriculture, as one would expect for a nation of its size and geography. Certain commodities were almost too abundant (rye comes to mind, because the Nazis aggressively pushed Roggenbrot or rye bread) while others were scarce. So it might have been possible to funnel some of the surplus crops into ethanol production even if there were shortages of important foodstuffs.
 
reconstruction of Germany's railroads
I had a similar thought: use railway more. Which may've required rebuilding, & certainly required more new construction (North Africa, anyone?).

Can Germany do more coal liquifaction? Or was she at a limit already? I'm thinking KM use of crude might be reduced, & used by Heer, instead.
 
Certain commodities were almost too abundant (rye comes to mind, because the Nazis aggressively pushed Roggenbrot or rye bread) while others were scarce. So it might have been possible to funnel some of the surplus crops into ethanol production even if there were shortages of important foodstuffs.

Sugar Beets, given the climate, would give best return

And back to mechanization, even steam traction engines rather than ICE Tractors, gets rid of the Horses. In the USA after WWI when tractors took over from horses, Farmers could use those acres that had been growing fodder for the horses, could grow crops to sell. That typically added 1/3 to overall production
 
Some quick googling didn't really give me what the effective BTU per pound of coal slurry was.
promising, though.

Calorific value: 3700–4700 kcal/kg. Compared with 'Tarong black coal' of 4800 kcal/kg, and 'Morwell Brown Coal (Lignite)' of 2006.
 
*Widespread Karrack process implementation - also creates electricity

*Convince pre-war German planners that the proposed underground refineries (Der Riese etc) slated for 1941 instead of 1944 as OTL are vital should the war last longer than expected

*Can the Exxon donor solvent process be blunder upon earlier?

*Manure-based synthetic oil evolved from the Fischer-Tropp process and the pilot plant was making 500 barrels of oil out of about 300 tons of turkey scat per day though the process to years to perfect (about the same amount of time it took from the discover of the FT process to World War 2...) and cost of OTL $80/barrel was an issue.

*Belgian biodiesel of late 1930s gets attention from German planners or researchers, especially if combined with algal oil (this exists, the idea was originally published in Germany in 1942)

*Safe hydrogen technology via crude fuel cells plausible but less likely (first modern such fuel cell was made by F.T. Bacon in the late 30s...if Germany ran with it earlier...?)
 
Top