Run Your Car on Wood? No Joke.
I’ve heard of making fuel from wood before, but rarely does using wood as fuel come up. However, just today I was pointed to this site, hosted by a local radio station, with a real-life example of someone burning wood as a fuel in his truck.
I can’t say for sure how the system works, whether it’s dual fuel or the wood-burning supplies all the fuel the engine needs, but it doesn’t appear to be a hoax and is certainly interesting. Evidently, during WWII, there was some experimenting with alternative fuels (due to shortages caused by the war), and one of the results was the wood burning automobile.
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I can’t comment on emissions, but something tells me this practice would be not the choice of people concerned about air quality or GHGs. Another problem I see is that wood is not very energy dense compared to liquid fuels, meaning you would need a lot of trees and a big “wood tank” to get any sort of range out of your wood-powered vehicle (WPV).
That said, this WPV is definitely on the neat side of things. For another real-life example, check out a truck that runs on coffee grounds.
See two more pictures below, and for more, visit this site.
Posts Related to Car Hacks and Alternative Fuels:
- A Truck That Runs on Coffee Grounds (and How Wood-Gas Powers Cars With Garbage)
- Car Hacker’s Hummer Gets 60 MPG
- How to Get 76 MPG
- Six New Technologies Will Help Manufacturers Reach the 35 MPG Goal (Without Hybrids)
- The Cleanest Cars on Earth: Honda Civic GX and Other Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs)
- MicroFueler Makes $1/gal Homebrew Ethanol From Sugar
- 376.59 MPG Car Found In Museum (It Was Built In 1959)
- Car and Driver Increase Pinto Fuel Economy with $11 of Ecomods
- Sick of Gas?: Convert Your Car To Run On Electricity
Image credit: Claire L. Evans at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
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May 13th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
The truck is powered by what’s known as “producer gas” and it’s not really very efficient. Kind of nice if you’ve got nothing else, but not if you can run your car off of something like say alcohol. There was an engineer in Yugoslavia who converted his Yugo to run on the stuff when the country was cut off from the rest of the world due to sanctions.
You can read a bit about producer gas here: http://members.tripod.com/~cturare/eng.htm
A how-to book on the subject can be found here: http://lindsaybks.com/bks4/mathot/index.html
May 13th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Found the website on the wood powered Yugo. It actually runs slightly BETTER on producer gas, but that’s not really saying much seeing as how it’s a Yugo.
http://freeweb.deltha.hu/zastava.in.hu/wood-gas.htm
May 13th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
This is supposed to be a viable alternative? Where is a cheap source of wood going to come from? Have none of you heard of steam powered trains, which burned wood and coal starting in the USA in 1930? Guess what happened? A quote form Wiki:
“Up to around 1850 in the U.S.A the vast majority of locomotives burnt wood until most of the Eastern forests were cleared; from that time on coal burning became more widespread and wood burners were restricted to rural and logging districts. In Europe, this lasted well into the 20th century.”
May 14th, 2008 at 5:30 am
hoax you scrub. wtf is going to power the engine?
May 14th, 2008 at 5:37 am
During the second world war, cars driving on wood was common in Denmark.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Burning wood for producer gas is an age old technique. In several countries after the WWII it was used to replace ordinary fuels. It is not really enviromentally friendly or efficient, but does provide (almost) free fuel.
Here are some finnish examples.
The fact that this made digg and most of you people think it is something new or neat is an excellent example of how bad the US education system really is. Sad, really.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:54 am
An older Finnish friend of mine, now deceased, spent many hours telling me of his experience during WWII. The Finns rigged their military vehicles to run on the gas given off by charcoal and were able to successfully fight off the invading Russians.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:57 am
Um …..
DEFORESTATION
GLOBAL WARMING
Lets just run the car in the garage with all the exits closed — it’s quicker
May 14th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Are we talking about converting to fuel a natural resource that is getting scarcer than oil?
May 14th, 2008 at 6:59 am
That is not big news,not here in scandinavia at least.
Here in Finland these contraptions were quite common
during and after WWII.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:42 am
The gas generator was invented 1877.
These gas generators were “quite common” in Denmark back in 1939. Gas supplies were cut off, and a commercial market of gas generators was born. AFAIK this was a common solution in most of Scandinavia (and probably further south in Europe) due to the large forests.
Cars, trucks, busses and even motorcycles were driving on wood. And this wasn’t just some crazy project, it was a solution to a national problem.
Danish Nimbus motorcycle with gas generator http://www.motorcykelgalleri.dk/uploads_large_wm/169053.jpg?24-02-2008%2012:50:58
Car with gas generator
http://www.tekniskmuseum.dk/archive/hvemVarDe/teknikogos/billede_11_1942_1952.jpg
Truck with gas generator
http://www.truckerlinks.dk/magirus/05magirus_sl3000zl.jpg
Tractor with gas generator
http://www.historie.syd-fyn.dk/lok-foren/claus-skov/images/traktor4.jpg
May 14th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Oh, and here’s a video of a Swedish “wood car”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8iR5DRLpw&feature=related
May 14th, 2008 at 8:01 am
I’m 73 years old and I remember that during WWII. In Melbourne, Australia, where I lived then, most of the (very few) cars on the road dragged a trailer behind, with equipment much like your pic. They burned charcoal to make the gas to drive the car. They also caused a lot of grass fires. The rest of us got around on bicycles.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Old stuff:
http://www.ekomobiili.fi/Tekstit/english_etusivu.htm
May 14th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Another name of this technology is syngas and it was widely used in WWW II dye to fuel shortage.
Today it is used more in Coal centrals to help them use low calory coal and in some manufacturing processes.
Basically it produces CO2 and hydrogen.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:14 am
this is definitely not a hoax. during WW2, oil was a rarity in sweden and a lot of cars and trucks ran on this gas (“gengas” or “generatorgas” in swedish) that comes from burning wood or coal. people still use it to run vehicles but mostly at a hobby level. there are some power generators sold to third world countries though that runs on this typ of gas.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Hello there!
Reading your post about the wood fueled car made me remember the work of the dutch artist Joost Conijn.
Joost Conijn made a trip through Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Slowakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Transnistrië,Ukraine, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Italy, France& The Netherlands driving his wood fueled car.
He eventually made a documentary about his adventure.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HbwlQuPO9Ek
http://www.joostconijn.org/film/houtauto/index.php
Best,
Pieter Frank
May 14th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
this the end of our forest man, don’t u see how bulk is tht and where in the space to load our cargo? I have seen things like that b4, i saw a track running on a charcoal wood.
This mean more destruction to our only remaining forest and more global warming and disasters
May 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
That’s er awful? I don’t suppose it helps the environment or the driver a lot. I guess the driver has to be coughing half the time. Definitely against concepts of http://www.SaveGasSaveEarth.com
May 14th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
didn’t some cars run on charcoal somehow during WWII?
May 14th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Didn’t the Germans do this during WWII?
May 14th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
my roommate John Rinaldi built a truck that runs on biomass. Check it out here http://caferacercrew.com/
May 14th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I’m sure it puts out a lot of C02, but didn’t the C come from the atmosphere to begin with. If a fixed amount of forest was used for this, that would be a one-time C02 hit. The size would be dependant on how forest would be required to sustain the wood consumption of the car.
If the forest was allowed to grow back completely when you were done with the car, it would be a net of zero.
Instead of fossil fuels which continuously add to the net carbon available on Earth’s top layer and atmosphere.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
[...] commenter on Ben’s wood-powered truck post pointed us to a similar car hack. The truck above is also powered by a wood gas generator, except [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
During WWII in Finland there was not enough gasoline available and so people had to get creative. Here’s a link to war time wood-gas solutions.
You can google for more pictures with these two keywords:
puukaasutin
häkäpönttö
First word means in Finnish “wood carburetor” and the second one is slang like “carbonmonoxide tub”
May 14th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
In the picture, the air cleaner lid is flipped upside down, wouldn’t any fumes created by the wood burning apparatus and attached to the air cleaner snorkel just be vented to the atmosphere??? This looks suspect.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Thats really ingenious! Reminds me of the scene in Back to the Future when Doc fuels the Delorean with beer and banana peels! However, the system shown would release to much carbon dioxide and with De-forestation as big an issue as it is I don’t think it would “fly” on a mass scale.
Also, in cold areas I would hate to be the one that would have to go light the trash in Morning to start the car while I scrape the ice of the windows.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
i mix dog shit and bourbon together to burn in my scooter, works fine, does not go fast enough to get away from the smell.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:19 am
The Scandinavian countries produced over a million wood-gas powered vehicles during WWII. Back in the 80’s FEMA used some of this experience to put together a booklet on how to build your own wood gasifier out of common materials to run your vehicle in a national emergency situation. The cost was under $3K and the generally cited conversion was 1 mile per pound of wood.
A 1997 report by NREL estimated 95% life-cycle carbon closure for a stationary power plant that used gasification of wood biomass to generate electricity.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
For those yelling “global warming”, “wtf” and “deforestation”, this method is an alternative for places where you can’t get other kinds of fuel, because they are either inaccessible or too expensive.
It’s not very efficient, and it’s expensive (to build one that lasts longer, because of the heavy oxidation in the oven, I’ve heard).
I wanted to build one of those myself just for the fun of it, but good plans for it are hard to find where I am.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Instead of using up oil lets just cut down even more trees and more deforestation to power our cars! We already have a huge problem with deforestation. This is not the answer and might even be worse than just using oil..
May 17th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I have submitted your article to http://www.autocar-live.com which is a social site where users can submit car/auto articles and vote for already submitted articles.
May 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Global warming – you believe everything you hear. If only everyone was a scientist like Al Gore…….
May 19th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
JackHammer said on May 14th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Burning wood for producer gas is an age old technique. In several countries after the WWII it was used to replace ordinary fuels. It is not really enviromentally friendly or efficient, but does provide (almost) free fuel.
Here are some finnish examples.
The fact that this made digg and most of you people think it is something new or neat is an excellent example of how bad the US education system really is. Sad, really.
The US education system is not as bad nor sad as you are. Because a few posters had not heard of the wood-gas concept you decide to use this as a basis to condemn an entire population. In fact you have been trolling the Internet looking for ways to spread your hatred of the US using the default excuse “it is the USA’s fault etc.”
In fact wood-gas powered vehicles are not practical unless other fuel isn’t available. Wood is not very energy dense as compared to gasoline or even alcohol.
In WW2 wood-gas was used as an emergency fuel. An engine using wood-gas was very difficult to start, required a long preparation time to get the generator working and large quantities of wood. Does this sound like the way forward? No. Wood-gas is at best a niche technology.
Resolve you hatred of the US privately please. The Americans are leaders in many technologies. You are only hurting yourself by simply disregarding whatever they say or do.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:08 am
It is no hoax. I have ridden in that truck.
The basics are this…you burn some of the wood to provide heat to gasify the remaining wood. Woodgas contains CO, H2 and a little CH4 and some inert gases.
Mixed with about 1:1 ratio with fresh air and an internal combustion engine runs on it quite well…in fact the exhaust is much cleaner.
There are limitations…the gas mix has a very slow flame front, so maximum usable rpm is around 2500. This is why the larger engined vehicles are better for conversion to woodgas.
It has less energy than gasoline, so you will only get around 80% of the power your engine would make on gasoline at 2500 rpm. The gas comes out pretty hot, and contains some ash and tar as well, so filtering and cooling are important. The cooler the gas going into the engine, the more power is produced. That is what the various canisters and pipes accomplish.
The owner of this particular vehicle has several wood powered vehicles, and is good at designing woodgas generators on a shoe string which work well and produce little to no tar compounds (tar compounds will stick up the valve train on your engine). His wood had a bit of extra water in it the day these pictures were taken, and he had opened up the air filter to allow it to dry while he was in town. He was still refining the use of this one, as it is his newest conversion.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:44 am
For those of you worried about deforestation,The amount of wood waste from industry that ends up in a land fill is devastating.In Pennslyvania alone 7 million tons of wood waste ends up in a landfill a year. I have built a gassifier and use it.It creates less CO2 than a gasoline engine,and I also get my wood as waste from a small manufacturer.Wood that would end up going to a landfill.So not only am I reducing emmissions but also using energy that would be thrown away.Large industries are revaluateing gasification technology.It can be used to produce eletricity,heat and remove waste all at the same time,while emmitting less pollutents in our atmosphere than our coal burning electricity plants.Gasification coal burning plants are 96% cleaner than regular coal burning plants. Check it out for yourselves.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Deforestation to power your vehicle…. Not really all the wood that is consumed in the production of woodgas is almost always waste wood. Wood that would end up in the land fill or chipped up, for making mulch. All wood decays producing the same amount of CO2 as it has consumed in the life cycle of the tree. The same amount of CO2 is produced by gasification. The net effect is zero additional CO2 emissions.
Here in Nebraska we just had a huge storm pass though. Lots of trees were blown down. I now have enough ELM to fuel my truck for several years, if I convert what has been given to me into fuel.
There is enough waste wood around to fuel a lot of vehicles. Woodgas is not the solution to global warming but it is not contributing to it either. Woodgas contains a significant amount of hydrogen; the water in the wood is actually cracked to form HHO gas in usable amounts. When the hydrogen combusts, if forms H2O again. Now that you know you can drive on wood just take an extra look around and you will see how much wood is just going to waste…..
Jonathan
http://www.woodgas.net
May 27th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I prefer the Air Car video on GreenEnergyTV.com This car does run on air and hope to drive one of these soon!
Here is a link to the video: http://greenenergytv.com/Watch.aspx?1213869141
Pete
May 30th, 2008 at 6:01 am
Just watched a eco documentary called planet mechanics here in the UK. The lads converted a pick up truck to run on wood only, the only engine mod required was a home made carb for mixing the gas and air. Fact is burning the dried wood produced less emissions than the unleaded fuel in all areas inlcluding carbon monoxide and particulates. Running a car on wood has zero carbon foot print, think about it. The wood has had to be grown and trees produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Providing the wood is taken from renewable sources what’s the problem?
The lads estimated that two sacks of wood (36kgs) gave a range of about 150 miles. Given the price of petrol here in the UK which is currently about 10 bucks a gallon. Wood works out to be not only much cheaper but cleaner. If one was to design a commercial wood burning producer suitable for all car motors then surely this would be a good thing for the enviroment providing renewable sources of wood were used.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
[...] Run Your Car on Wood? No Joke. [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Wood , Charcole whats the difference when things get tight enough people will do something to drive if they can .
I say let the wheels of modern society grind to a hault and let the little guy make some smoke if he can . We all got fat and too lazy to drive very far in a vehical such as whats described here .
The world would be a far better place if we took the machines off the road and out of the air .
With factories pumping tons in the air daily or one crummy flight from New York to the west coast dumping more poison in the air than a person using charcoal to drive could create in a life time . However the one single guy using it would be blamed for all the bad air plus the green house effect while big industry pumps the air full without even being questioned .
June 16th, 2008 at 6:51 am
I have been researching wood gas. Mother Earth New has had several articles and have modified a vehicle to run on wood. The process is considered carbon neutral because it just returns the CO2 that the trees absorbed when growing. One pickup I read about got about 1 mile per pound of wood although that varies with the kind of wood. They also run on charcoal, coal and even coconut husks. The gases produced for combustion in the engine are mainly hydrogen (as moisture is sucked through glowing charcoal)and carbon monoxide. Many deaths well caused by leaky construction of the converters during WW II.
The power produced is less than running on gasoline.
DEH
June 17th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I was the person who took the pictures of the truck, and submitted them to Coast to Coast AM. I claim no copyright, but if you could work in a credit, that would be nice. This is the nice vehicle. I have a picture of his wood burning station wagon that is pretty fun. And he has a web site that should probably be listed somewhere. Let me know if you want that info.
Chef Dave Bulla
Mineral Point, WI
June 20th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I’m the truck guy. Notice I had to flip the air cleaner lid over to let my air filter to dry out from the engine heat. It was foggy that morning and the super saturated air mixing with the woodgas was condensing in the throttle body etc. I have a small preheater on it but it wasn’t adequate that morning. Mike LaRosa
http://www.intergate.com/~mlarosa/images/woodgas/?M=D
June 20th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Oh, one more comment. I’m just using it a little faster than the ants and fungus which would probably release more greenhouse gasses than my use. I pretty much just burn branches and wood that fall from the trees on my property (14 acres). Exhaust from the truck is cleaner than with gasoline generally. My 2 cents, Mike
June 20th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
A wood powered vehicle sounds like a great idea! There are millions of tons of blow down trees that are totally going to waste in the woods and forests of the USA, and aside from going to waste, they also present a forest fire hazard….therefore a wood powered vehicle sounds great, and actually increases safety of our forested areas.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:57 am
I know this can be done cause they did it years ago and we know more about steam and it’s powerwe need the people that know how to put together.We need people who will work on it and not worry about making money on it.I think it has good chance but we got to get going on it right away. Later BG
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 am
BG, I’ve been posting pictures, drawings, etc etc etc for several years now. There are a few folks in Scandinavia also posting pics, plans, etc etc etc .. Even with all of this, only a handful of folks have actually done anything .. It’s a shame. I really doubt the first internal combustion engines were run on gasoline but I guess I don’t really care. There will be a pile of big trucks and SUVs that will be easy to convert to hydrogen. I have a 66 chevy Impala I also run on it and when I get a good percentage of hydrogen in my gas, I really like the sound of it. flapity flapity .. Mike
July 9th, 2008 at 11:34 am
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July 24th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
the gases evolved might be very toxic when burning of fuel to creat woodgas.
how many km the car runs or its hospower it may creat.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
gaurav, Once the gasifier is started, there is nothing emmited by it. While it is warming up, it puts out the same as a small wood stove or camp fire. The woodgas consists of mostly hydrogen and CO and after it goes through the engine, the emmisions tests are usually cleaner than with gasoline. I have to dump some ash and charcoal and some condensate but the vegetation seems to grow better when this is applied sparingly. It has a lot of nutrients in it. Mike
August 20th, 2008 at 2:24 am
I think it is fantastic for the environment. Burning wood is renewable. Therefore doesn’t increase overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere as long as we plant enough trees to replace what we use. Also better for our economy. What we see here is 1930s technology. If a car company produced a modern equivalent I think it would be a viable alternative. Some improvements could be – Wood gas reserve pressure tank to enable cold starts, exhaust heat to assist in the wood breakdown, automatic timing adjustments to handle other fuels like paper etc.
Alas …. while petrol is still affordable and we don’t mind all of our money going overseas to pay for it commonsence alternatives like this are going to remain a hobby.
August 20th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Adding onto my last post. Many bio fuels use up resources that we need as food eg Corn, wheat, sugar etc which sends up world food prices. Wood doesn’t. Also with a little hydrogen injection any hydocarbon scraps could be used as a fuel. Come on car companies do some real innovation.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:27 am
I and two other people are at the present time building a wood gas geherator, we plan on running a ford dlat bed truck with it, We in three days got every thing welded up and on the stand that holds the burner and the ash cleaner, we plan on firing it up this coming week.
Also at the presint time I have built a three grid hydrogen generator and have designed it to where the water never gets over 78 degrees, I ran it at two hundred amps 12V DC for three hours and this as high as the tempture ever got, I plan on installing it on my car this coming week.
After futher test I plan on setting up a web sight to sell the plans and instructions for $25.00 this includes postage in the USA, and for the ones that like to order itens then copy them, then try to get their money refunded, I plan on putting a seal on the package with the plans and insreuctions, if the seal has been broken then they can not get a refund, and beleave me they will have to break the seal to open the package.
November 15th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I was reading a little bit about producer gas vehicles used in WWII and not only was wood used but also coal and other types of solid fuel. Apparently the gasses produced to fuel the engine are highly toxic, but as the engine combusts the gasses, the emissions of CO don’t seem to be any higher than older gasoline engines. With catalytic converters and other modern technology, they could probably be designed to run very clean. Of course using wood as an alternative fuel today is not a realistic solution, but perhaps coal or some other readily available solid fuel could be used and might be just the solution to reduce dependance on oil for certain limited applications!
January 9th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
WHAT????? Greenhouse gasses? Are people really that dumb? There is no harm in burning wood. Millions of Americans heat their homes with wood, including me. The carbon in the wood came from the environment. When the wood burns it releases the carbon which is then picked up by the next tree/plant/etc… It is moving the carbon around, not dumping extra carbon in the air. When fossil fuels are burned, that carbon is locked deep underground and is not suppose to see the light of day. Burning wood goes NOT contribute to global warming. Only people that could possible be made are the true tree huggers.
Locomotives stopped using wood once coal became more available.
They stopped using coal when oil became readily available. Matter of fact, some of the last steam engines were converted to burn oil instead of coal/wood.
January 11th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Hello Me, Jack, Mr. John, Truck is still running fine. My 91 oldsmobile runs perfect on the woodgas and my 95 oldsmobile runs great with the gasifier trailer behind it. I am currently building a stand alone gasifer for it. I have the tough parts done already and plan to piece it together this week while it is below zero here. Regards, Mike
March 21st, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Blue prints to build this system will be needed / lloyd/
December 21st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
i think all these solutions are great . theres just one thing i would like no where do or what website do i go to that would show me how to make my own gasifire for home heating purposes i already burn wood in a old wood burning stove
December 27th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
during and after WW2 many vehicles ran on wood, charcoal, coal, and real neat carbide.Japan.
December 30th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Common sense – before people get too excited – or put this idea down too far think about what this does – it is an option. Most likely this will never be a popular option – I also don’t think running an engine on french fry oil is practical for most people and won’t be popular. However, the exciting thing is that we are re-discovering options found decades ago that may work for some people in some cases. Example, I have a brother-in-law with his own saw mill. He usually just gets rid of all the shavings and saw dust any way he can, usually just spreading them on his property. He can’t give enough of it away. For him (and for me) this could be an option that can work since I have access to these resources. Knowing about the technology and having resources to use it is a big key – as for global warming, yeah keep that idea up. I don’t think that is gaining a whole lot any more either – thankfully