Friedrich Bergius

Friedrich Bergius was a German chemist who in 1913 developed the Bergius process, a method of hydrogenating coal under high pressure and temperature in the presence of a catalyst to produce liquid synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. Industrialized in Germany during the interwar and Second World War years, the Bergius process supplied a significant share of Germany's aviation and motor fuel at a time when the country had little access to natural petroleum, making coal-to-liquid conversion a genuine wartime energy strategy rather than a laboratory curiosity. Bergius shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Carl Bosch for their work developing high-pressure chemical methods.