No oil / suggested modification

[1940LaSalle]

Please note: I also posted a similar thread in the Civ 4 area but thought I'd toss this out here as well.

Oil may or may not be available within one's own borders; if not, that's a handicap. But is there some modification someone has made for researching synthetic fuels as a technology as a work-around? Seems to me that at least two nations (South Africa and Germany in the '30s and '40s--yeah, I know, not the most pleasant regimes) used synthetic fuels to a great degree.

If not, perhaps this is a modification that could or should be made. It would require refining and electricity as tech prerequisites, along with water and coal as resources. The result would be the capability to build a synfuels site. There would have to be some quasi-penalty (e.g., a greater likelihood of pollution) for a synthetic fuels plant, but it seems like a reasonable approach.

Thoughts?

 

[Omni314]

it would be good, i think it could only be put in a future era or right at the end of the modern though,
where another resource is found thats better (like iron -> aluminium)
or where 'its in abundance now' (ilke saltpeter)
i would say its most likely to be the latter

 

[timerover51]

Coal to liquid fuel technology was developed around in the early 1900s, the Bergius Process in 1913, and the Fisher-Tropsch Process in the 1920s. Prior to that, syngas was made as a byproduct of coal coking, the syngas being a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The idea of synthetic fuel technology to overcome a lack of oil is a good idea, but I would make the requirements be coal as the raw material and refining as the advance. Since Brazil is 80% powered by alcohol from sugar cane for its land transportation, you could also set up an alcohol fuel plant with the requirements of sugar cane as the resource and refining as the advance.

Synthetic Rubber would also be a possibility, as the first synthetic rubber was produced prior to WW1. For that you might want have both industrialization and refining at the prerequisite advances.