Friedrich Bergius: The Chemist Who Turned Coal into Gasoline

On October eleventh, eighteen eighty-four, Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). He was a chemist and inventor, and his academic field was industrial chemistry and high-pressure chemical technology.

Bergius is best known for his pioneering development of the coal hydrogenation process, also known as the Bergius process. In the early nineteen-hundreds, he worked on chemical reactions under extremely high pressure. His major breakthrough came when he discovered that powdered coal could be converted into liquid hydrocarbons, such as gasoline and diesel, by treating it with hydrogen under very high pressure and at high temperatures. This process made it possible to produce synthetic fuel from abundant coal resources, which had enormous strategic and industrial importance, especially for countries without large oil reserves. For this groundbreaking research on high-pressure chemical processes, Friedrich Bergius was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen thirty-one, jointly with Carl Bosch. His work laid the foundation for the modern petrochemical industry and synthetic fuel production.