WoodGas Cars: 1000 kg of wood = 365L of gasoline, no refining required | Hacker News Reader

WoodGas Cars: 1000 kg of wood = 365L of gasoline, no refining required

en.wikipedia.org

6 pointsJabavuAdams7 comments

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Automatic, clearly.

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