All That Gas
The Donald sent me an article from the Bozman (MT) Daily Chronicle about a guy in Nebraska who drives a big Ford F-250 pickup fueled by wood gas produced in a generator in the bed of the truck. He gets 60 miles to a gunny sack of wood with his vehicle.
The story is interesting because it's an implementation of a technology over 150 years old. You see, before Big Oil sold us on petroleum, gas produced from wood and coal was the primary fluid (gas, liquid) fuel used in the United States. Every town had a generator for producing "town gas" to the light the street lights, heat the cooking stoves, and such like.
Lest you think town gas was a trivial thing, here is Seattle's town gas works, now preserved in a city park.
The use of gas generators was common during the Second World War both in the United States and Europe. Indeed, Germany fueled all its war machines with liquid versions of wood and coal gas. (A by-product of the German process was Bayer asprin!)
If you want to build a gas generator for your car like this fellow in Nebraska did, you will find 90 pages of details for doing so in a publication by FEMA entitled "Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency". You can download a copy here.
By the end of WWII, the oil and gas industry had gained the upper hand over the coal industry and we began our glut of petroleum consumption for everything from heating our houses, to generating electricity, to fueling our automobiles. And, Big Oil has been pulling the strings and pushing the levers in Washington ever since. As a result, they are currently swinging us by our national testicles with $4-per-gallon gasoline.
We have centuries and centuries of wood (renewable) and coal (non-renewable) reserves and only a few decades of petroleum (non-renewable) reserves. The technology to convert has been around for 150 years and more. Indeed, the issues in doing so are not technical but rather are political. All we need to do is run Big Oil and their governmental "co-conspirators" out of town on a rail and get on with it.
And, of course, Iraq will quickly return to being just another sand dune on the Middle East radar screen.
The story is interesting because it's an implementation of a technology over 150 years old. You see, before Big Oil sold us on petroleum, gas produced from wood and coal was the primary fluid (gas, liquid) fuel used in the United States. Every town had a generator for producing "town gas" to the light the street lights, heat the cooking stoves, and such like.
Lest you think town gas was a trivial thing, here is Seattle's town gas works, now preserved in a city park.
The use of gas generators was common during the Second World War both in the United States and Europe. Indeed, Germany fueled all its war machines with liquid versions of wood and coal gas. (A by-product of the German process was Bayer asprin!)
If you want to build a gas generator for your car like this fellow in Nebraska did, you will find 90 pages of details for doing so in a publication by FEMA entitled "Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency". You can download a copy here.
By the end of WWII, the oil and gas industry had gained the upper hand over the coal industry and we began our glut of petroleum consumption for everything from heating our houses, to generating electricity, to fueling our automobiles. And, Big Oil has been pulling the strings and pushing the levers in Washington ever since. As a result, they are currently swinging us by our national testicles with $4-per-gallon gasoline.
We have centuries and centuries of wood (renewable) and coal (non-renewable) reserves and only a few decades of petroleum (non-renewable) reserves. The technology to convert has been around for 150 years and more. Indeed, the issues in doing so are not technical but rather are political. All we need to do is run Big Oil and their governmental "co-conspirators" out of town on a rail and get on with it.
And, of course, Iraq will quickly return to being just another sand dune on the Middle East radar screen.
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