Searching for alternative petrol for more than 100 years

It was a Dutchman who invented the combustion engine. As early as the seventeenth century. The fuel he used was… gunpowder. Christiaan Huygens invented his engine in 1673 for Louis XIV to have his fountains sprayed in the gardens of Versailles. It was a cylinder with a hanging piston, in which a little gunpowder was detonated at the bottom. A real explosion engine, then. A century later, in 1794, the Briton Robert Street discovered that such an engine ran better on liquid fuel. You first had to heat it up and you had to collect the gases in a tube.

A new fuel was also created according to such a process: light gas. At the end of the eighteenth century, the process was developed to extract combustible gas from solid fuels, such as wood and coal. The material was heated in a sealed, oxygen-depleted space. The lack of oxygen prevented the wood or coal from igniting, but the heat caused it to disintegrate. A combustible gas was released, of which methane and hydrogen gas were the main components. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this process was perfected so that it became possible to build gas factories in cities. The name was therefore town gas, but also light gas, because it was primarily used for street lighting.

For example, networks of gas pipelines arose in European cities. Light gas was easy to obtain, which is why it became the fuel for the first combustion engines. In 1860 Paris, Étienne Lenoir developed such a small business engine, one that was lighter and cheaper than the usual steam engines. That engine was in fact a converted steam engine with two cylinders, which worked with two strokes, so was a two-stroke engine. At the same time as Lenoir, the French engineer Pierre Hugon built such an engine, and shortly afterwards Nikolaus Otto from Cologne arrived with his four-stroke engines.

MAN diesel truck

The problem with light gas was that it was difficult to take with you. Liquid fuel was more suitable and around 1870 the Austrian Siegfried Marcus was already using some kind of petrol as fuel in his first motorized cart. And when Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz independently built their first cars in 1886, they also ran on gasoline. The combustion engine according to the Otto principle became the norm. Yet another version appeared on a different principle. Rudolf Diesel wanted to develop an engine that was more efficient than the steam engine. The idea was to strongly compress the air in an internal combustion engine, making it so hot that the injected fuel would ignite spontaneously without a spark. In 1897 Diesel built that engine at his employer, Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, now known as truck manufacturer MAN. The new engine initially ran on petroleum. Later a separate petroleum product was developed for it, which came to be called diesel oil, but which was not far from heavy fuels such as petroleum and kerosene. The diesel engine was mainly intended for stationary use, for example to drive commercial machines, but in 1923 MAN installed the engine in a truck. The first passenger car with a diesel engine was the 1936 Mercedes-Benz 260D.

In the meantime, all kinds of alternatives to petrol were sought. In the First World War, the shortage of petrol took such extreme forms that serious attempts were made in France to run cars on light gas. Wood gas generators were born for this purpose: mobile gas factories, as it were. During the crisis of the 1930s, the gas generator was touted in France as a cheap alternative to petrol. Everything changed when the Germans occupied the Netherlands. In June 1940, a month after the German invasion, most petrol stations were closed. The petrol stocks were largely taken to Germany, what remained the occupier kept for itself. Overnight, the gas generator became virtually the only device that allowed a car to drive. Generators from German, Swedish, Austrian and French manufacturers were soon available. Many of them worked on wood, but the wood stock in our country was insufficient. Fortunately, we had the coal mines in Limburg, so we could use coke and anthracite in the generator. We also had another useful fuel sourced from peat soil: peat. Peat consists of thousands of years old layers of plant remains and was extracted from the ground surface. Rainwater turned most of the excavations into puddles, including the Vinkeveense Plassen, although peat extraction was concentrated in Drenthe in the twentieth century. At the end of the war, Nazi Germany switched to the production of synthetic gasoline, made from coal.

bottled gas car

After the Second World War, car traffic started up again in fits and starts. Just as reconstruction was gaining momentum in the mid-1950s, a new problem arose: the Suez crisis. This conflict over access to the Suez Canal sparked a war between Israel and Egypt. In the end, Egypt blocked the canal. As a result, the oil supply from the Arab world to the West came to a standstill and petrol once again became scarce. In 1956 there was a driving ban on Sundays for some time: the car-free Sunday. Again this led to a search for an alternative to petrol. The petroleum gasifier, which had already been tried in the 1930s, was given a try again. Petroleum served as fuel for stationary engines and tractors, but they ran at lower and mostly constant speeds. Petroleum was impractical in a car because the substance made the car difficult to start and was also difficult to gas. In Someren in Brabant, Leo Koppens, owner of a machine factory, succeeded in adapting the petroleum gasifier in such a way that these drawbacks virtually disappeared. The car was started on petrol and Koppens’ Cargas installation then heated the petroleum with the heat from the exhaust. A thermostat ensured the transition from petrol to petroleum as soon as the temperature of the gasifier was high enough. The installation consisted of a gasifier and a combined carburettor for petrol and petroleum. The advantage of the Cargas installation lay in the low price of the fuel. In 1948 a liter of gasoline cost 46 cents, while a liter of kerosene, a purer variant of petroleum, came to 19 cents. However, the road tax for a car running on petroleum was 115 percent higher. Refueling was possible at 200 filling stations throughout the Netherlands.

LPG refueling in the 50s

For a short time, the petroleum gasifier enjoyed modest popularity. But from the US came another fuel: LPG. This was not a heavy, fatty fuel, such as petroleum or diesel, but a volatile hydrocarbon compound, a mixture of butane and propane gas. The big advantage: it was already a gas under atmospheric pressure and only a slight pressure was needed to store it in liquid form. In 1954 the first serious tests with the new fuel were carried out. At that time, most trucks ran on petrol and it was worth converting them to LPG. As with petroleum, cars on LPG had to pay more than double the road tax, but the advantage on a liter of LPG far outweighed this. LPG started in the 50s on an advance that only stopped in the 90s. The diesel engines in passenger cars had meanwhile become so good that they surpassed the comfort and reliability of a car running on LPG. The dispute had been settled: petrol and diesel remained the most important fuel for traffic. At least, until now.

This article originally appeared in AutoWeek Classics issue 9 of 2017.