Gas 2.0

No doubt many of you have read or heard about David Nichol’s woodgas F-150. I came across it during a media hailstorm a few months ago (which has since petered out). But while I was doing research on the One-Gallon Challenge, I saw that David’s truck was going to be participating. I gathered up my camera and notepad and my best friend (who I sort of tricked into coming) and took the drive to Greenfield Mass. last Wednesday night to get a look at this truck, and other fuel-sippers in person.

I learned a whole lot more than I bargained for.

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Global warming. Climate change. The greatest threat to continued human survival. The rhetoric these days can be awfully scary regarding new energy and oil. Sometimes it feels like we’ve all been doomed already by a hyper-active media always looking for the “next big story” to terrify us with. But I don’t really take anything seriously, so I am always on the lookout for a fun twist on a real problem.

What could be fun about climate change, you ask? Well, besides the fact that my home might end up as beach front property one day if we don’t mend our sins, how about a race? One that challenges contestants to go 100 miles on a single gallon of gas? That is the goal of the One-Gallon Challenge, where six contestants and their very different vehicles have to make the journey from Greenfield, MA to Boston in three hours using as little fuel as possible.

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If you spent any time as a child in the 80’s, you probably spent a more than a few afternoons longing for your own flying DeLorean, hover-board, and Marty McFly Nikes.

Unfortunately, you still can’t have any of those things (although the Nikes did appear on eBay, briefly, and sold for $1300 US), but maybe you can have something better:  a real, honest-to-goodness Mr. Fusion!

The “Mr. Fusion” reactor mounted to the back of Back to the Future’s famous DeLorean hovercar produced the car’s fuel by extracting chemical energy from common household garbage.  While the 1985 movie version of Mr. Fusion put out enough power to juice the good Doctor Brown’s flux capacitor all the way to the year 2015, the 2008 version will probably only get a few miles down the road.

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Photo Credits: deborah sherman photography

The Cafe Racer Truck Runs on 100% Recycled Coffee Grounds

A 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 this one runs on coffee grounds. The Cafe Racer is a 1975 GMC pickup that essentially burns up used coffee to create a combustible gas. The gas is filtered on its way to the engine and, Viola, a caffeine-powered truck. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »