Ahem,
Ever heard of the Bergius process (developed 1913 in Germany) or the Fischer-Tropsch process (developed 1925, also in Germany) for making petrol out of coal?
Coal is Germany´s most abundand natural energy resource, while we have very little oil, so Germany´s chemical industry concentrated for a long time on manufacturing oil out of localy mined coal, especially during war time.
German coal only became uneconomical in the 1970s, when imported coal from e.g. Australia or China became cheaper. The reason is that while German coal is of good quality, the coal seams, especially in the Ruhr area, are up to 800 meters underground and are only up to 3-4 meter thick. Australian can be dug up using strip mining technologies, since the seams are only covered by e.g. 50 meters of dirt, and the thickness of the seams is up to 20 meters, so instead of high tech mining. like in Germany, they can use ordinary diggers to get it. The Chinese on the other hand don´t bother about safety for their miners and they get paid third world wages, due to this, up to now, Chinese and Australian coal is, even included the transport, cheaper than German coal. Currently there are only 10 active coal mines left in the Ruhr area, in the 1950s there were hundreds.
There is a change coming though:
There is still a lot of steel industry in the Ruhr area, which requires coke for smelting the iron. In the past the steel mills were often built beside coal mines and had their own coke plants. In the 80s, the managers closed the coke plants, since the Chinese could supply coke at a lower price than localy manufactured coke.
But now the Chinese are catching up on steel manufacture for their own market and refuse to export coke. This drove steel prices in Germany up and there are thoughts now to reopen some coal mines and to build new state of the art coke plants. This shows the dangers of making your economy too dependend on some other country.
German chemical industry was always coal centered (as seen with the Nylon versus Perlon).
Jan