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What if: Germany's goal in 1941 was Oil?

Discussion in 'What If - European Theater - Eastern Front & Balka' started by HawaiiFO, Aug 26, 2009.

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  1. SOAR21

    SOAR21 Member

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    There you go. The Allies wouldn't skip a beat.
     
  2. T. A. Gardner

    T. A. Gardner Genuine Chief

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    Just a couple of notes:

    The Persian Gulf oil fields were just beginning development as WW 2 started. The companies involved were primarily US ones like Esso or Texaco. I learned that visiting the Oil Well Museum in Bahrain.

    Horses put out 5 to 15 horsepower depending on how hard they are worked not 1 horsepower. Just thought I'd point that out.....
     
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  3. brndirt1

    brndirt1 Saddle Tramp

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    Right-o T.A.Gardner. People tend to forget that a hp isn't really the power of a horse, or at least not really. The term horsepower originated with James Watt, who determined by experiment that a horse could do 33,000 foot-pounds of work a minute in drawing coal from a coal pit.

    Consequently in the English system, one horsepower equals 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute; that is, the power necessary to lift a total of 33,000 lbs a distance of one foot in one minute.
     
  4. LJAd

    LJAd Well-Known Member

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    Their oil production diminished by 40 % in the war,and still they planted their flag on the Reichstag :)
     
  5. leopold

    leopold Member

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    Hmmmm, I'm confused.
    This article states that horses can produce up to 15 hp,but only in brief peaks,
    for prolonged work they actually produce less than 1 hp:
    Horsepower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    So maybe you mean that they can put 5 to 15 ,but only for brief periods of time?

    Trucks on the other hand can sustain their horsepower. (until you meet a police car or your radiator bursts :)
     
  6. leopold

    leopold Member

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    Their oil production, but not the consumption.
     
  7. brndirt1

    brndirt1 Saddle Tramp

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    The USSR's production did decline, but so did their export to Nazi Germany. In fact it stopped completely after June 1941, so those millions of tons of oil were still availale as well as the USA's L/L oil which started showing up in Nov. of that year.
     
  8. LJAd

    LJAd Well-Known Member

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    Was the L/L supply of oil and no more export enough to compensate the falling production ? Maybe all oil was reserved to the military ? But in that case could the economy go on without oil ? I do not know if there are any figures of the distribution of oil between military and non military purposes . But given the few :eek: I know about the Soviet economy before the war,I think that she was in essence dependent on coal(like most economies in these days )and that the Red army could function whit much less oil than the Western Armies,having even in 1945 more horses than trucks .Cheers
     
  9. brndirt1

    brndirt1 Saddle Tramp

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    Remember, in the time-frame of L/L shipments, late 1941- mid '45 there were 2,670,000 tons of refined petroleum products received (not just shipped) to the USSR. And these files I will link you guys to were used to compare to the Soviet’s own records when it applied for those IMF and American loans just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. They had to deal with the default loan act which was and is still in effect in the US.

    That total tonage is in this list somewhere, just scroll through and you will find it somewhere. As a footnote, the comment on the bottom of the page was made in the height of the Cold War, and Harry Hopkins was being berated as a KGB spy.

    Odd statement when one remembers that the KGB didn’t exist when the list was first made, but did exist when the file was published by Harcourt and Brace.

    See:

    Complete List of Lend Lease to Russia including atomic materials

    and:

    Oil of Russia : www.oilru.com : “Oil of Russia” magazine

    This one uses a "rounded up" figure of 2.8 million tons, which is slightly too high, and may reflect SHIPPED and not RECEIVED. That could be the difference in that those tons were lost to enemy actions. Now to figure out barrels instead of tons, remember that distilled/refined petroleum products weigh less than this, a gallon of light sweet crude weights in at 7 pounds per gallon. In this case a person will get more barrels per ton in the refined products

    The standard bbl of oil is measured in 42 gallon sizes, not 55 gallon sizes. This 42 gallon corresponds to the 35 imperial gallons originally used to ship salted fish, and made the standard size a LONG time ago, and adopted by the US petroleum industry in the 19th Century when we (America) were setting the standards.

    So if you figure a standard barrel of crude is 42 gallons (US), and sweet light crude weighs 7 pounds per, then a barrel equals 294 pounds. A short ton (used in this field is 2000 pounds), an English, or metric ton (not used in the petro-world) is 2,204 pounds). Using those standard petro-numbers, a ton of oil is 6.802 barrels of crude.


    I am sure the fuels and such were strickly limited to military use, and rationed strickly in the USSR just as in the other nations. And as you mention, the USSR as well as most other nations (USA possible expception) were coal based for heat and transportation.
     
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  10. STURMTRUPPEN

    STURMTRUPPEN Member

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    then germany would have controlled all of europes oil and the war would have finished four years earlier
     
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