BERLIN: Hitler had a problem.
It was early June 1942 and although the diabolical German leader’s plan to whip his Volk In a frenzy, raping and looting, the rest of Europe showed early success, its army had hit a wall at Stalingrad and was literally on empty.
“We have a significant German production, but what the Luftwaffe and ours Panzer to swallow divisions is incredible,” he said during a meeting with the top commander of the Finnish army that was secretly recorded. “Consumption goes far beyond any expectation. My country depends on imports.”
The Führer and his henchmen knew from the beginning that Germany’s limited crude oil reserves could not satiate a flash war. A cutting-edge German invention known as ersatz, or synthetic fuel, offered what they hoped would be the perfect solution. It was elusive.
Fast forward 90 years and Germany is once again chasing the dream of synthetic fuels. Berlin’s battle this time is not to subjugate a continent, but to save the internal combustion engine, the soul of its industrial economy. In recent weeks, the German coalition has carried out a rearguard action to scrap new EU rules coming into force in 2035 that would effectively ban new registrations of cars that run on the fuel in order to boost sales of electric vehicles Berlin’s big idea to save the engine? Synthetic fuel.
Unlike the Nazis, whose plan was to liquefy coal, the current German government is pushing a cleaner technique that involves extracting hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon dioxide to create fuel. At the heart of both methods is what is known as the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a process developed in the 1920s by two German chemists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.
It is unlikely that many Germans today (or those doing business in Brussels) are familiar with this story. And yet the inherent risk of depending on others for energy has been etched into Germany’s collective subconscious for more than a century. From the British blockade in World War I that starved the Reich of oil imports to the recent destruction of Nord Stream, the pipelines under the Baltic that delivered cheap Russian gas to German homes and industry, Germans they are no stranger to the dangers of foreign energy dependence. .
In the years following Germany’s crushing defeat in World War I, Fischer and Tropsch were pursuing the same desire for independence that drives German energy policy today, from Berlin’s ambitious transition to renewable energy, the energy transitionto his last flirtation with ersatz fuel
German leaders see modern synthetic fuels, often called e-fuels, as a clean alternative to gasoline and diesel, one that could preserve the industry behind the internal combustion engines that have powered Mercedes and BMW for generations. In addition, keeping the motor would make Germany less dependent on imports of lithium and other minerals essential to the production of electric vehicles.
However, Germany’s latest synthetic fuel push faces the same obstacle as the first: high cost.
Most auto industry executives have poured cold water on Germany’s e-fuel dream because of the massive investment it would entail.
Hitler faced a similar challenge.
In the early 1930s, synthetic fuels were considered uneconomical, especially when oil prices plummeted in the midst of the Great Depression.
Even so, Hitler (like his predecessors) was keen to make the Third Reich less dependent on foreign oil from American and British producers, forcing Germany to spend foreign exchange it could not afford. Given the abundance of coal in Germany, synthetic fuel was the obvious alternative. Less than a year after the Nazis took power, Hitler’s government signed an agreement with the chemical giant IG Farben to subsidize the production of synthetic fuel on a large scale.
In the following years, IG Farben (the company also produced the pesticide “Zyklon B” used as a weapon of mass murder in the Nazi gas chambers) and other German chemical companies opened more than two dozen of the so-called plants of hydrogenation to convert coal into fuel. As the recovery in world oil demand drove crude prices higher in the 1930s, Germany’s bet on domestic synthetic fuel, which was not subject to import duties, began to look predictable .
Along with another German chemical innovation, the synthetic rubber used to produce tires, the coal-based fuel would prove crucial to keeping the Nazi war machine moving as it raced to seize oil fields in Middle East and the Caucasus. In 1943, Germany obtained about half of its fuel from liquefied coal.
“We knew we were short of fuel, so we built the plants that would supply it,” boasted Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring during the war. “Today we are in possession of all the tools we need to defeat the enemy.”
Not exactly. In the end, the Nazis’ lust for energy outstripped their ability to extract liquid fuel from coal, as Hitler lamented on his trip to Finland. Synthetic fuel plants, one of which was at Auschwitz, were also easy targets for Allied bombing.
After American bombers destroyed the Germans’ main synthetic fuel plants in May 1944, the top Nazis knew they were finished.
“From the point of view of technical production, the war was lost with the success of these attacks,” Albert Speer, a Hitler confidant responsible for armaments, said after the war.
A few weeks after the bombings, Allied troops landed in Normandy on D-Day.
Germany’s lack of reliable domestic energy resources proved to be its Achilles heel (to the relief of the rest of Europe).
This continues to this day. Germany may be Europe’s industrial powerhouse, but it needs foreign oil and gas imports to keep the engine running.
As fate would have it, Porsche, the sports car maker founded by Hitler’s favorite engineer and father of the VW Bug, Ferdinand Porsche, may have a way to end that dependency.
In December, the company opened a pilot plant in the southern tip of Chile, where it uses wind energy to produce synthetic fuel.
“The potential of e-fuels is enormous,” said Michael Steiner, Porsche’s head of research and development, at the plant’s opening. The company has no plans to produce the fuel in Germany, but the country’s windy north coast would be a natural place to do so.
Meanwhile, German lobbyists have been busy pushing the e-fuels agenda in Brussels. A group led by former German politicians and lobbyists known as the eFuel Alliance advocates for synthetic fuels in everything from passenger cars to planes and ships.
The most prominent proponent of the idea, however, is Christian Lindner, the German finance minister and Porsche devotee whose Free Democratic Party pushed the recent e-fuel crusade from Berlin to Brussels. He wants to support the production of synthetic fuel with tax incentives.
“It will take time before we have these cars on the road with e-fuel in the tank, but for people and businesses to plan, it’s important that e-fuels are taxed less than fossil fuels,” he said. he said this week.
A free-market liberal, Lindner is a fierce defender of the democratic traditions of post-war Germany. However, in a strange historical twist, his ministry is located in the same building that served as Göring’s wartime headquarters.
What could go wrong?
Joshua Posaner contributed to this report.
