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.
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Image credit: Claire L. Evans at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Didn’t the Germans do this during WWII?
my roommate John Rinaldi built a truck that runs on biomass. Check it out here http://caferacercrew.com/
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.
[...] 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 [...]
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.