information:extraction
Germany

Oil and its byproducts, especially high-octane aviation gasoline, would prove to be a driving concern for how Germany conducted the war. As a result of the lessons of World War I, Germany had stockpiled oil and gasoline for its blitzkrieg offensive and had annexed Austria, adding 18,000 barrels (2,900 m; 100,000 cu ft) per day of oil production, but this was not sufficient to sustain the planned conquest of Europe. Because captured supplies and oil fields would be necessary to fuel the campaign, the German high command created a special squad of oilfield experts drawn from the ranks of domestic oil industries. They were sent in to put out oilfield fires and get production going again as soon as possible. But capturing oilfields remained an obstacle throughout the war. During the Invasion of Poland, German estimates of gasoline consumption turned out to be vastly too low. Heinz Guderian and his Panzer divisions consumed nearly 2.4 liters per kilometer (1 U.S. gal/mi) of gasoline on the drive to Vienna. When they were engaged in combat across open country, gasoline consumption almost doubled. On the second day of battle, a unit of the XIX Corps was forced to halt when it ran out of gasoline. One of the major objectives of the Polish invasion was their oil fields but the Soviets invaded and captured 70 percent of the Polish production before the Germans could reach it. Through the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement (1940), Stalin agreed in vague terms to supply Germany with additional oil equal to that produced by now Soviet-occupied Polish oilfields at Drohobych and Boryslav in exchange for hard coal and steel tubing.

Even after the Nazis conquered the vast territories of Europe, this did not help the gasoline shortage. This area had never been self-sufficient in oil before the war. In 1938, the area that would become Nazi-occupied produced 575,000 barrels (91,400 m; 3,230,000 cu ft) per day. In 1940, total production under German control amounted to only 234,550 barrels (37,290 m; 1,316,900 cu ft). By early 1941 and the depletion of German gasoline reserves, Adolf Hitler saw the invasion of Russia to seize the Polish oil fields and the Russian oil in the Caucasus as the solution to the German gasoline shortage. As early as July 1941, following the 22 June start of Operation Barbarossa, certain Luftwaffe squadrons were forced to curtail ground support missions due to shortages of aviation gasoline. On 9 October, the German quartermaster general estimated that army vehicles were 24,000 barrels (3,800 m; 130,000 cu ft) short of gasoline requirements.

Virtually all of Germany's aviation gasoline came from synthetic oil plants that hydrogenated coals and coal tars. These processes had been developed during the 1930s as an effort to achieve fuel independence. There were two grades of aviation gasoline produced in volume in Germany, the B-4 or blue grade and the C-3 or green grade, which accounted for about two-thirds of all production. B-4 was equivalent to 89-octane and the C-3 was roughly equal to the U.S. 100-octane, though lean mixture was rated around 95-octane and was poorer than the U.S. version. Maximum output achieved in 1943 reached 52,200 barrels (8,300 m; 293,000 cu ft) a day before the Allies decided to target the synthetic fuel plants. Through captured enemy aircraft and analysis of the gasoline found in them, both the Allies and the Axis powers were aware of the quality of the aviation gasoline being produced and this prompted an octane race to achieve the advantage in aircraft performance. Later in the war, the C-3 grade was improved to where it was equivalent to the U.S. 150 grade (rich mixture rating).