Anthony N. Stranges, <i>Petroleum from Coal: A Century of Synthesis</i> Leiden: Brill, 2024. Pp. xxii + 407. ISBN 978-90-04-54411-6. €160.00 (hardback).

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there', wrote L.P. Hartley in his 1953 The Go-Between.Stranges's hefty volume, with its cover bearing the faces of four stern male German chemists and its account of the attraction of petroleum, testifies to that.The endeavour to produce petroleum from coal cost very large amounts of money, consuming the careers of many people and the lives of even more.It was crucial to Nazi Germany's ability to fight a six-year war and was internationally emulated, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the dream has faded.The environment, the author assures us, was not a theme in the writings of the people and corporations he has looked into.Moreover, many of the huge companies this book explores, including IG Farben, Standard Oil and ICI, have gone.This, then, is an analysis of a bygone age.By the end of the First World War, it was clear to many that the era of coal would end, and that the era of oil was just beginning.Automobiles and aeroplanes were petroleum-native technologies, and both ships and locomotives were transferring to petroleum fuels.Meanwhile, millions of people were employed directly in extracting coal and millions more were dependent on their declining spending.Germany, a coal-rich country, had little oil, but two impending superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were oil-rich.The solution that appealed to chemists, particularly in Germany, was to transform coal into oil.Stranges has been writing about the effort to synthesize oil for more than forty years.In a series of classic papers, he preserved for future historians an international story.This book is based on modified and updated versions of those separate papers, integrated for the first time.The key resource on which he has drawn is the huge archive of German material trawled by British and American investigators in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and now available at Texas A & M University, where he works.This volume itself is a chronicle of huge value.Following an overview first chapter, two subsequent chapters deal with the dominant German effort.The first takes off from the perspective of lead scientists, such as Bergius.The second deals with the corporate level.Much of this testifies to long-term planning and technological prowess that led to the building of twelve coal hydrogenation plants and nine Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plants.The former added hydrogen to coal under high pressure and temperature; the latter broke down coal to carbon monoxide and hydrogen and, from these ingredients, catalytically synthesized oil.Engineering and chemical data on the processes and the complex equipment used have been carefully excavated and presented.