The Japanese could not have pumped oil, or generated any substitutes, in the quantities they needed from any of the territories they controlled at the time.
The key is AT THE TIME. A working embargo would have crippled them for many years. They didn’t have the technology, then, to work around the embargo and no time to do it.
Given a decade or so they could have, barring economic collapse, etc., used China’s large coal deposits to create synthetic petroleum just like Germany did. That’s just one option.
What we are talking about here however is not a case of needing oil in a windows of months to a couple of years, but generations, and not in a small patch of the world but all of it.
The argument does not depend on Iranian or Saudi reserve reports. There are multi-Saudi-Arabia size reserves of recoverable petroleum in the US and Canada.
Why is there a plateau? Why isn’t it spectacularly rising from discoveries all over the world? Why is the plateau not calibrated in BTUs rather than barrels, and what is that in BTUs per capita as population rises?
Why would China sell coal reserves to Japan in 1941, when Japan was in the middle of massacres up and down the Chinese east coast?
What is the conversion efficiency of coal to petroleum and can it be done at 80 million barrels per day with all the fresh water in the world?
The Japanese wanted Indonesia’s oil to fuel their society and the US Navy would have prevented that. They would have enforced the embargo. No sovereign nation can allow another to dictate its policy via embargo, just as the US refused to allow the Arab oil embargo to dictate its policy towards Israel. So the Japanese had to react.
Worshiping at the altar of technology necessarily presumes that what we might call miracles will occur and they will occur on an as needed schedule.
Look, the bottom line here is an incredible number of lies are being told. Propane is being called equivalent to crude. In some articles “barrels of oil equivalent” are being used to lump a concept of *hydrocarbons* together and 1 barrel of volume containing room temperature natural gas has 1/1000th the BTUs that oil has.
There is no energy crisis. There IS an oil crisis. There is no answer to be found in conservation. The answer is in military suppression of competing consumption.