The excellent German movie, The Counterfeiters, tells the story of a group of concentration camp prisoners who created the most successful counterfeiting operation in history, knocking off both the British pound and the American dollar.

Running out of money and resources, it wasn’t just paper that the Nazis were trying to recreate. With oil supplies running low, they turned to synthesizing liquid fuel from coal. The operation was quite successful, although it fell short of the original production goals, and was small potatoes by today’s fuel consumption standards. Still, various fuels constructed from the raw material of coal supplied half of the German machine, historian Peter Becker noted back in 1981.

Image from: A bombed out synthetic fuel plant. From Texas A&M professor, Anthony Stranges’ presentation on Germany’s synthetic fuel factories [pdf].

At the peak of their synthetic fuel production in 1943, when half of their economy and their armed forces ran on synthetic fuel, the Germans produced 36,212,400 barrels of fuel a year. At current rates of imported fuel alone, that quantity in this country would last all of four and one-half days!

Nowadays, actually, we use about 21 million barrels a day in the US, so it’d last us about 40 hours.

The German example is interesting, though, because of the rhetorical purpose it serves. Becker uses it to argue for the creation of a synthetic fuel industry in the US to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

Whatever scientific-technical approach will ultimately be deemed preferable, there is no doubt that from a purely technological point of view this country can assure itself of adequate supplies of fuel in relatively short order. The actual problem is not one of technology so much as one of political responsibility, courage, will, and wisdom on the part of the administration and the United States Congress. The approval of a $20 billion synthetic fuel program by the United States Congress is a first, cautious step in the right direction.

Becker was writing in the wake of the oil embargo of the early 70s and in the midst of the Cold War, but his situation isn’t that different from our own. We now import even more of our oil, and use 70 percent of it for transportation. (The rest goes into food, products, roads, chemicals, and just about everwhere else).

Economics lends the urgency to quests for new fuel sources. When the price of oil goes up — for whatever reason — green fuel technologies look better. But the market isn’t really eco-conscious, so any technology that could be cheaper than gas or diesel gets a hard look from investors.

The most common fossil fuel-based answer to the decline of oil fields is go German and  convert coal into liquid fuel. It’s not just military historians that would like to see greater use of synthetic fuels. Presumably nice guys even argue for turning coal in to liquids, like Jeffrey Sachs does in his most recent book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

“The best evidence regarding the total fossil fuel supply is that we have enough for this century, even with substantial economic growth,” Sachs writes. “But we will have to increasingly rely on coal and other nonconventional fuels.”

From my perspective, transitioning the nation’s crude oil infrastructure to a crude coal infrastructure is a huge step backwards, not forwards.

[Of course, Sachs also cops the Shell energy scenario's basic premise for one section of his book (Resource Scramble or Systematic Innovation), so perhaps he's not exactly a green role model for Portland-types.]

My working definition, after all, of a green technology is any idea, machine, or system that has the potential to reduce the use of fossil fuels, so I’m going to call technologies like coal-to-liquids anti-green.

The problem is that they probably will work. In fact, as we can see from the Nazis, synthetic fuels do work and can be produced at industrial scales at prices that American (and world) consumers can deal with.

And that’s why accelerating green innovation is so crucial. It’s not just about beating the current fossil fuels infrastructure, it’s about beating the anti-green alternatives of the future.

In the spirit of know-thy-enemy, here’s what Becker had to say about the Nazi’s coal liquification strategies:

Both coal and petroleum are mixtures of hydrocarbons, and the problem was how best and most efficiently to isolate these elements from the coal and transmute them into oil. By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, four methods of achieving this were either available or in early stages of perfection.

The first process produced benzol, a byproduct of coking. Benzol was used as a fuel in admixture with gasoline. The drawback to increased production of benzol was the fact that it was tied to the quantities of coke that were needed at any given time, and these in turn were determined by the production limits of crude iron.

The second method produced a distillate from lignite coal. Brown or soft coal was gently heated, and the tars and oil were then extracted and distilled into fuel. The end product was of such low quality, however, that only 10 percent could be used as gasoline, with the remaining 90 percent useful only as heating oil and diesel fuel.

A third formula, the Fischer-Tropsch process, was, at that time, still in the research and testing stage. Under this system, coal is compressed into gas which is mixed with hydrogen. By placing this mixture in contact ovens and adding certain catalysts, oil molecules are formed. Further treatment of this primary substance generates fuel, chiefly diesel oil.

Coking and distillation extracted oils and tars from coal, and additional cracking refined them into gasoline. The Fischer-Tropsch process and a fourth method, the hydrogenation process, changed coal directly into gasoline. As coal is a hydrocarbon containing little hydrogen and gasoline is a hydrocarbon with a high hydrogen content, the problem consisted of attaching hydrogen molecules to coal, thereby liquefying it. This was the basis of the hydrogenation process, which required high temperatures and high pressures. By 1933, this method had been thoroughly tested and was ready for large-scale practical application. The advantage of the hydrogenation method was that as primary material it could use the tars from the distillation of both lignite and bituminous coal (although the distillation of the latter was not possible on a large scale until 1943) as well as lignite and bituminous coal directly.

Most energy BigThink people (e.g. Sachs) now talk about using the Fischer-Tropsch process (which rhymes, conceptually and lyrically, with the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen into ammonia, usable for bombs or fertilizer) to directly go from coal to diesel. It turns out, however, that the F-T  process didn’t fair so well:

Even more unrealistic were the completion dates assigned to twelve Fischer-Tropsch plants with relatively low production goals; they were to be finished by 1 April 1938. By 1945 only nine of them were operational; they reached their maximum capacity in 1943 with less than 2.8 million barrels.

Another leading expert on the Fischer-Tropsch process’ historical use, Anthony Stranges of Texas A&M, called the WWII-era Japanese synthetic fuel industry, “a good case study of technological failure.” [pdf]

Delays? Underperformance? Technological trouble? Difficulty scaling? Unrealistic expectations? Proponents of antigreen technologies love to ascribe these issues only to green technologies, implying that the Fischer-Tropsch or other antigreen ideas are foolproof, can’t-miss technologies. The truth is, any new technology trying to scale to the size of our current infrastructure will struggle and encounter unexpected problems. Example A: our current transportation system based on the internal combustion engine. Remember leaded gas? How about the use of MTBE as an oxygenant? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

A general rule: when you do it U.S. economy big, you will run into and create trouble, so we might as well use technologies that have the best initial environmental profiles. Otherwise, the US economy might live out Lil Wayne’s rhyme, “I don’t do it big no more. I do it dinosaur.”

Image 1: A bombed out German CTL plant. From Anthony Stranges’ presentation on synthetic fuels, hosted at Fischer-Tropsch.org
Image 2: A schematic of the basic CTL process. From Bureau of Mines Information Circular 7366 hosted at Fischer-Tropsch.org.