Wood Gas Engines

Wood Gas

When wood is heated above 700 °C (1,292 °F) it releases a combustable mixture of gases called "wood gas" or "producer gas" which can be used to run an internal combustion gas. This has been know for as long as there have been internal combustion engines and no, the information has not been suppressed by greedy corporations. People have been experimenting with this all along, and during WWII about two million vehicles in countries where gas was unavailable were converted or manufactured to run on it. All manner of wood burning vehicles are currently parading up and down the streets of youtube with thuosands of guys cooperating and competing with each other in a large and enthusiastic online community. There are wood burning trucks and cars and tractors and lawn mowers and generators and guys just flaring it off into the night and hollering "yahoo". Government agencies have long promoted the emergency use of wood gas. Here is a FEMA pdf called "Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency". The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has produced this document titled "Wood Gas as Engine Fuel".

Here i've collected some resources from the profusion of information available online:

Ben Peterson is an energetic person who is high on woodgas. He's doing amazing work so i'm glad he's so enthusiastic about it. Here is his Wood Gasification 101, module 1. It's a youtube univercity degree in wood gas technology.
He starts with the basics here and gets into detail with subsequent videos. I hightly recommend it. His good energy is being put into good energy and is highly contagious.
Here is a link to his Victory Gasworks: An Online Community for Gasification.

Here is a totally technogeeky explanation of his newest model of gasifier , designed for power generation in off grid situations.
He is talking to the worldwide web of wood gasification enthusiasts and experimenters, and i find this very interesting in its own right. It is very much open source development.

The BioEnergy Lists site has a huge gasification section. There is a vast amount of information. The site is not easy to use, but worth the effort. Exploring the archives and links, i'm amazed at the worldwide scope of interest and investment in this, and at people's determination and resourcefulness.

This is from the Yahoo wood gas group. A pretty busy group as these things go, so if you should join , you might want to get email in digest mode. I think this is the best list of this sort i've ever belonged to. The conversation is informed, innovative and often surprisingly witty.

Perhaps you have heated your house,cookedyour food, or even warmed your hot water with wood, but have not yet figured out a way to generate your electricity, or run your internal combustion engines with it....yet. Well, guess what? This isn't even new technology, and it is available for you to use today. This technology, called gasification, can be used to make the functions of cooking,and heating, far more efficient, too. From as early as the 1700s people have been making a high quality combustion gas from wood and other biomass. This gas is similar to propane, and natural gas. DuringWWII, a million vehicles ran for years on this "Producer Gas." This is not an undeveloped technology, but there is plenty of room for advancement, in terms of developing ways to utilize it.