Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Why did Synthetic OIL not solve the AXIS OIL Crisis?" video.

TIK -- it's a FACT that American oil drilling rigs brought in a duplicate to Baku during late 1942 into 1943. This field is STILL producing. It was discussed at length -- the FULL hour -- on the McNeil-Lehrer Report in 1979 -- the Fall. Their guest was one of three American technical salesmen who trained Russians how to "turn right" with a rotary drilling rig. They'd never seen one before. Such rigs punch holes 27 times as fast as a cable drill. ( See "There Will Be Blood" for that technology. ) Russia STILL has unexploited crude reserves in Siberia of immense scale. That's why Putin is still operating like a sheik.
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@Grimmtoof Not quite true. Libyan crude only needed a distillery -- not a refinery. The former are referred to within the industry as 'tea-pots.' Distilling was how the oil refining industry started. True refining -- the manipulation of the feed stock -- didn't happen until the 1920s in the US. Even today, MANY European 'refineries' are actually distilleries. As a chemist for the difference. A distillery can be fully set up in MONTHS. To achieve market viability, such a unit needs SWEET, LIGHT crude. This is EXACTLY what Libya produces -- all that it produces. So, the Italians and Germans really dropped the ball. Shell Oil could've saved their bacon --but as a matter of corporate policy would NOT. Shell acted like Sgt. Schultz. "I know nothing."
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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.
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@kekistanimememan170 Alcohol injection was its own sub-system and did not cross over into the avgas. It was vented into the throttle body -- not through the injectors. in this way, it chilled the intake air increasing the density while adding even more fuel to the combustion chamber. Alcohols have octane ratings up over 100 -- so they did not induce knock thereby.
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@TheArklyte The Nazis were not rebuilding Jumo engines to speak of. The pressure was on to crank out more engines -- not spares and replacements. The Luftwaffe was in absolutely no position to dedicate top of the line talent to tear into working engines. PM was not an option. Jumo 004Bs were run until they broke. That's the real reason that the ME262 had twin engines. Flame outs were entirely expected. The He 162 would've been falling out of the sky right and left. No nation had 'reliable' jet engines until WWII was long over. This edict came directly from Adolf -- and covered EVERYTHING in the Nazi production scheme. Speer bitterly whined about this in his own autobio. (1967)
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@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.
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@allangibson8494 That's not it. The rotten fuel used by ME-262s was NEVER scarce. It was the ENGINES. They didn't last but a dozen flight hours... and Germany couldn't get their production tempo up.
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@sammypurple1326 The RN could not operate that close to Stukas. Read up on Operation Pedestal. If the Axis realized that Libya had lots of terrific oil -- everything would've changed. Barbarossa would never have been launched in 1941. Crushing Churchill would've had top priority. Invading England would've been dropped -- it being impossible. The goal would've been to Gallipoli Churchill one more time. Gallipoli tossed Winnie out of office in WWI. The loss of the Suez Canal would've surely done the same. THAT was the ONLY strategic shot the Axis had. Without Churchill, Britain would've cut a deal. She was starving, too -- and actually BROKE. Losing Singapore, and Hong Kong to Japan and Suez to Germany would've done Winnie in. India, Iran and Iraq would've been impossible to sail to. Palestine and the Greater Levant would've fallen to Rommel. The Muslim Arabs would've revolted against the colonial British. (See Muslim Brotherhood -- it was entirely anti-British back then.)
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@mikefay5698 France was a MAJOR coal producing nation. She also produced iron ore. After occupation, France was kicking 50,000 tons PER DAY into the Nazi economy. (Speer,1967) France was also a massive food supplier to Germany -- and she STILL is! Yeah, that's a lot of wine and cheese. Heh.
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@allangibson8494 True enough. Champaign war on a beer budget does not work.
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@allangibson8494 That's what happens when the delivery trucks run out of gasoline. Heh.
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@giupiete6536 Actually the US didn't have the reserves you post of. Rubber was in crisis. What the US had was a reserve of TALENT. Once the matter became a crisis, the Americans flew into highest gear and crafted synthetic rubber plants at lightning speed. At the time the crisis was Top Secret. It's the reason that the American government begged all patriots to surrender their worn out tires ASAP. Those 'skins' tided the US over until synthetic rubber poured out of new warplants. Beyond that, America's rotten experiences in WWI informed them that they had done everything wrong. So in WWII the railroads were NOT nationalized. FDR & Coy put railroad executives in charge of even their expeditionary railroad battalions. There's a YouTube out there on this outfit. Its first Big Job was entirely replacing the existing stuff in French Northwest Africa. The original rails were all narrow gauge. This would simply NOT do! They also put out some propaganda video during the war showing their upgrades. The administration pulled together a committee of leading industrial executives -- and in a cartel style delegation of production -- priorities were set. To keep everyone happy, every firm was to expand like topsy -- with cost-plus contracts. These were heaven for auditors, BTW. Some audits remained unclosed for well after the war.
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@jonspeck4736 Strangely, the Italians and Germans didn't even attempt to drill for water. (!!!!) If they had, they would've struck water almost everywhere in Libya. Virtually the entire nation sits atop one of the world's largest aquifers. Think of all the gasoline used to haul water to the troops by Rommel & Coy! It was their NUMBER ONE cargo. And what they were actually hauling was terrible drinking water, over mineralized.
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@hernerweisenberg7052 Late war Allied fighters were routinely running 130 octane fuel. So they ran boost that the Krauts could execute only on their test stands.
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@ TIK Stalin told Churchill that the low point for the USSR was the spring of 1943. They'd totally expended their reserves. If Manstein had pressed on, Stavka could not have stopped him from shooting as far east as his feet could carry him! By July, this was fixed.
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Tarn Vedra -- it's amusing but CTL processes actually DO use water to make gasoline. The reaction is used to create 'synthesis gas' -- which goes by many another chemistry slang terms, BTW -- CO + H2 is the first stage; the second stage is called the 'water shift reaction' -- CO + Steam = CO2 + H2. The CO2 is easily condensed under pressure and its heat is exchanged away to warm up process fluids. ( air & steam ) The resulting H2 is used to attack long-chain coal solids to create a goop + char. The goop is further hydrogenated up into low grade fuels such as Diesel, kerosene and rotten gasoline. This process does not produce meaningful amounts of aviation gasoline, being too destructive to the aromatic structures common to coals.
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@solarfreak1107 You can Google around for 1920's era US Patents covering the process. These patents cover a much improved coal distillation technology far superior to the original British scheme -- which dates from the 18th Century. The originator went famously bankrupt. He had no customers for the char left behind by his process -- the Nazis DID. ( Steam boilers.) In the 18th Century he could not compete with whale oil based illumination.The poor Brit was ahead of his time. If the Nazis had merely cloned the US designs -- they would've been set. Use terms such as coal distillation, US patents, coal oil, ... etc. There's a TON of old literature on the topic. Some researchers spent their entire lives on the process. They were all done in by ultra-cheap East Texas crude oil discoveries. (Yes, Hunt's oil bonanza.) A century ago, many a man could not believe that crude oil would be continuously discovered in vast amounts for their rest of their lives. You STILL see this belief -- now termed Peak Oil... a term of art that now only raises laughter. Fracking has increased the global potential for crude oil by about FIFTY-TIMES over conventional oil. There are vast, vast oil deposits known world-wide that were always un-economic until fracking came along. They were simply TOO THIN -- even if they covered the land between the Ural mountains and the Baltic sea. (Yup!) That one strata has about 1,000 times as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia. EVERYTHING you've ever read about oil reserves only ever referred to conventional THICK deposits that merely needed a straw to suck the crude out. Fracking caused the entire oil industry to laugh at Peak OIl. Naturally Russa, and OPEC have been FRANTIC to shut down fracking. Think about their loss of markets. They've already lost the USA to frackers. Obama and Trump dang near killed their finances.
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@allangibson8494 Ploesti was lost in early September 1944 to the Red Army.
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@mikefay5698 You are largely correct BUT France does have coal down in the mountains. But mining it was of a much smaller scale because that coal was FAR from the primary markets up north. A&L were in the sweet spot. During WWII, the Nazis were not about to ship A&E coal to unoccupied France. So Vichy France subsisted on these lesser mines. This worked because Vichy France had but a fraction of the pre-war population of metropolitan France. (Vichy France included Algeria and Tunisia and French Morocco. Torch caused Hitler to invade, even air-landing troops into Tunisia.)
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@ TIK the American's sent THREE guys, salesmen, to Russia to show them how to use a rotary drill rig. One testefied on PBS (1979) about his experience. They were using cable drilling methods. See There Will Be Blood for what that technique looked like. Rotary rigs using Hughes bits cut 27 times as fast. Consequently, an ENTIRE new elephant field was brought on line during 1943. This field is still in production. It was entirely out of reach, being east of the Urals. It soon equalled the production of 1941 -- all by itself! Each new well flowed like a river, that's why.
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As we've seen in our own time, crude oil producers swing prices way high and way low because once a retail consumer has committed to using gasoline, bunker fuel, avgas [ when they purchase cars, ships and planes ] subsequent demand for liquid energy is highly inelastic. This dynamic has nothing to do with Central Bankers. Look at fracking. Just by slightly over producing light, sweet crude prices crashed from well over $120/bbl to less than $40/bbl. The reason for this is that unlike coal, once the drill pipe has found oil, the human labor required to keep energy flowing is trivial -- coal has opposed traits. It's easy to find, but entails tremendous on-going outlays to keep the coal coming. Until slurry technology came along decades after WWII, coal was not even all that cheap to transport. (trains versus pipelines) The ultra-low-ball crude oil price quoted early in your presentation was so low that the oil industry was going broke. The Texas Railroad Commission had to step in and stop oil drilling. This hiatus lasted for more than a year during the Great Depression. This commission regulated crude oil prices globally right up until the Arab Oil Crisis -- when it became obvious that AOPEC had the upper hand. Ironically, the founding members of OPEC did not participate in the cartel's embargo. (Venezuela and Iran founded OPEC -- not the Arab producers. They jumped on board rather immediately, however.) Back to the Great Depression: oil prices keep rising once the Texas Railroad Commission turned the American industry -- within that state -- into a cartel. Texas was so dominant that it pulled all other American production towards its pricing. BTW, General Thomas was entirely wrong. The Americans sent rotary oil rigs to the Soviets. These punched holes twenty-one times as fast as what the Soviets had been using. Typically, a hole started on Monday was ready to cap by Thursday. The field was simply not that deep, (1500 feet) the rock was pretty forgiving. The reason that the Nazis knew nothing of any of this because the field that the Soviets were punching had just been discovered. (!) The land was as flat as Texas. So rail lines could be laid lickety split. Stalin told Churchill that the Red Army reached its absolute nadir with Manstein's winter offensive. Uranus and Mars had entirely burned through Stalin's reserves. He needed the thaw to train a fresh batch of cucumbers.
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@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.
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@TIK Venezuelan oil is AMERICAN oil as at that time ALL of its production came by way of American oil firms. ( Standard Oil of New Jersey -- later known as EXXON )
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