Has any 20th century industrialized country ever had as much of a shortage of fuel as Germany and Japan in WWII?

by yupko
wolfram184

It is safe to say no, not by a long shot.

The fuel shortage in Japan was so extreme that towards the end of WWII there was an effort to produce a crude oil substitute from pine roots. Each gallon of the low-quality hydrocarbon mix took over two man-days of work, in an extremely energy and labor intensive process. Entire forests were dug up for the roots. Even after all of that labor, the oil/alcohol mixture would often destroy the engines it was used in. In parallel, tankers were being sent from occupied Indonesia despite the near-certainty that they would be sunk. Even one getting through might buy a few more days for the navy or a few more flights.

Germany spent a tremendous amount of money and manpower on industrial-volume synthetic oil production from coal, a process so expensive and inefficient that it never went beyond feasibility tests during the worst parts of the oil crises that the U.S. went through a few decades later.

That given, it is important to point out the difference between the total shortage of fuel that Germany and Japan suffered from and logistical shortages. In the U.S., there was (and remains to this day) huge differences between production and consumption centers. Even though the U.S. had plenty of oil, there was a point where the UK was within weeks of running out of gasoline and three months of running out of fuel oil for the Royal Navy due to German submarine warfare. Logistical shortages could mean that there was no fuel, at any price. However, those shortages for the Allies were never long or severe enough to facilitate the desperate lengths to which Germany and especially Japan had to go.

Source: The Prize, by Daniel Yergin