

WoodGas Cars: 1000 kg of wood = 365L of gasoline, no refining required - JabavuAdams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas#Usage_in_internal_combustion_engines

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brc
Not to point out the obvious, but 1000 kg is a _lot_ of wood. If you were
cutting down one tree to drive one truck 500 miles, you're going to go through
your trees pretty quickly. I would say that using wood to power vehicles is
hardly different from using wood to heat homes. Very heat, space and
distributionally inefficient.

The only useful applications of this technology are in places where there is a
lot of wood (or similar, see rice husks) and no oil, mainly due to
transportation factors (ie, remote communitiies in densely wooded area) or, in
times of crisis (such as war or rationing)

Still, cool to see the pics of Volvo 240's with mini-breweries on the back of
them. (see lowtechmagazein.com article)

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burgerbrain
On the other hand, if you care about this sort of thing (personally I don't
see this as all that big of a plus): effectively zero CO2 emission. Any CO2
that comes out of it was recently taken from the atmosphere when the wood was
grown.

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brc
Well, not really - it takes a lot longer to soak up c02 from the atmosphere
than it does to burn it and put it back in. 10-20 years to grow a tree - 10
hours to put it back. So yes, neutralised over a short-ish term timeframe. If
you had even a small percentage of people driving cars like this, forests
would disappear pretty fast.

All biofuels have the 'zero co2' factor. I'd rather see electrics powered by
hyrdo and nuclear, myself, if you consider c02 to be important. Because those
two options have zero airborne emissions completely, and that's a far bigger
factor in air quality than the amount of c02.

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JangoSteve
I thought this was a much better and more informative article:

<http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-cars.html>

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buddydvd
In the show, The Colony (Discovery), the colonists built a wood gasifier using
spare parts found within an abandoned warehouse.

Here's a video clip showing a wood gasifier (they eventually got it to work
but that part isn't shown in this clip):
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkH6mFlfH3o>

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JabavuAdams
I'm picturing autonomous wooden robots with wood-gas hybrid engines crawling
all over the Canadian north, building wooden wind turbines.

Not sure how to handle transmission, though.

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Groxx
Automatic, clearly.

