BULLETIN FOR THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
Volume 50, 2025
Kießling, Christoph, “Review of Petroleum from Coal: A Century of Synthesis by Anthony N. Stranges,” Bull. Hist. Chem., 2025, 50, 69-71.
https://doi.org/10.70359/bhc2025v050p069
Abstract/Description: Anthony N. Stranges's Petroleum from Coal: A Century of Synthesis is a substantial work on the history of synthetic fuels in the 20th century. The monograph combines technical historical depth with an international perspective on industrial policy developments, offering one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of coal liquefaction and the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. It focuses on the emergence, industrial implementation, and transnational reception of two major processes that were developed or perfected in Germany during the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, and that reemerged during global energy crises in the late 20th century. The book spans more than a hundred years—from Friedrich Bergius's early experiments around 1910 and the research at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim under Franz Fischer, to IG Farben's industrial plants and developments in Japan, the USA, UK, Canada and South Africa. It remains firmly rooted in current scholarship while also incorporating a vast trove of archival material that has been largely underutilized. From the perspective of a historian and archivist, what stands out most is the breadth and depth of the archival work. Stranges draws on an extraordinary body of documents he has collected and systematically analyzed over decades. At the core lies the Synthetic Fuels Collection at Texas A&M University, established during the German Document Retrieval Project in the 1970s. With over 300,000 pages of records—including reports from Allied technical missions (TOM, BIOS, FIAT), internal documents from BASF, IG Farben, Ruhrchemie, and the US Bureau of Mines, as well as government materials from Japan, Canada, and the UK—this collection forms the backbone of the study.