Nazi-era Technology Embraced by Republicans in U.S. Congress in the Name of National Energy Security

OilPrice.com ^ | 06/06/2011 | John Daly

[bananaman22]

Twentieth-century American military history has two iconic dates - 7 December 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and 6 June 1944, D-Day, when the liberation of Europe began.

The subsequent vicious Allied fight from Normandy to Germany saw the Nazis largely fueled by a technology that is now being promoted by the Republican Congressional leadership, in collusion with its munificent fiscal campaign energy supporters, as a way to lessen U.S. dependence on energy imports.

At issue is the Fishcher-Tropsch coal liquefaction process, developed by energy-poor Germany in the 1920s and expanded by the Nazi regime. Bent on dominating Europe, Hitler’s war machine suffered from increasing fuel shortages, first in September 1939 when Britain’s Royal Navy clamped a naval blockade on the Baltic, exacerbated in June1941 when the invasion of the USSR ended Soviet energy imports, leaving Germany largely dependent on Romania’s Ploesti oilfields after the failure of Army Group south to capture the Caucasus and Azerbaijan’s rich Caspian resources. FT production became increasingly critical to fueling Hitler’s war machine from then onwards, given Germany’s immense coal reserves.

By 1944, Germany was producing 124,000 barrels of synthetic fuels daily at 25 FT plants. FT was subsequently commercialized by South Africa’s apartheid regime, beginning in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company Suid Afrikaanse Steenkool en Olie (SASOL), founded in 1950, now a private company and the world’s leading proponent of FT. In the early 1980s, as UN sanctions against South Africa began to take effect, two large coal to liquid (CTL) SASOL production facilities were commissioned and now form the single largest and most profitable asset in SASOL's global portfolio. Full article at: Coal liquefacation

[jmcenanly]

Technology is neither good nor evil, it is the use of it that makes it so. If we were to discard all ‘Nazi-era’ technology, we’d also lose our interstate system, and our satellite launch capability.

[clearcarbon]

German science in the 30’s was often innovative
thanks in part to some progressive nazis.

[ThomasThomas]

The Nazi felt people should drive small cars also. VW

[SunkenCiv]

It's the Obamacare, stupid! One-half gallon of oil in the form of pesticides per bushel of corn would cost $2 to $3 per bushel. If this were true -- and it clearly isn't -- it should be enough to illustrate to literally anyone that the price of petroleum is quite literally the ONLY thing driving corn prices. And this idiotic piece of agitprop -- from a hydrogen "energy" advocacy site -- also shows the guy in the encounter suit spraying chemical fertilizer, a sight that I've never been privileged to see, what with me *growing up on a farm*. The Bum Rap on Biofuels [2008] Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed [2008] Oil Price Pressure Driving Global Switch to Biofuels [2006]