Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

88 pointsRygian42 comments

Given the times, these vehicles need a bumper sticker that says “This is not an IED.”

Jeff Lane has a few of these in the Lane motor museum in Nashville. Just about everything in the museum is in operating condition and he likes to show his collection off on weekend demo days, but I haven’t had a chance to see these run. Great car museum, all oddball cars, nothing normal. They recently finished building an accurate reproduction of the Fuller Dymaxion. https://www.lanemotormuseum.org/collection/cars/item/dymaxio...

> During the Second World War, almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was converted to use firewood.

How is this the first time me (or anyone else in this comment section) is hearing about this? It seems like a pretty major deal.

From what I gather the conversion wasn't a big deal. The engines of the time weren't picky about fuel, so you just have to find space to mount the wood gas generator (a very simple if bulky device) and pipe the wood gas into the fuel system. And once gasoline was available again those vehicles were easily converted back

If everything is operating correctly then yes it's wonderful. If conditions are poor then you are in for a bad time. There are a lot of things that can cause poor gas quality, often having to do with things like biomass moisture content, mineral content, and material feed. You can get into regimes where pyrolysis and reduction are incomplete and the tar content of the gas is high enough to stick valves and acidify the oil. Gasification is a fickle lover.

Some of us had the honor of learning about it from WWII vets... But, to your point, everyone in Europe was busy fighting the war, and there was very little 'driving around'. So not much talk about it.

Called "generatorgas" or "gengas" for short in Sweden. Almost all cars in pictures from the early forties had a little cart behind them. That was the generator.

I had heard stories of these from my Dad. He lived in country Australia (SA) during WWII, and the long-distance buses had been converted over to this.

Part of the problems with it is likely long term usage because wood is not an entirely predictable fuel. All sorts of hydrocarbon oils and tars can come out of it and the moisture content of wood can be all over the place.

Possibly modern wood pellets would eliminate many of these problems, but if you aren't getting a really good burn, which takes some skill to setup with just random chopped wood pieces, you may end up gunking the engine all up and filling the oil with crap and possibly having some not so great exhaust coming out.

Otherwise you need the skills and an engine simple enough to be worth semi regularly opening it up to clean all the carbon and crap out of it. Something that might not seem like too big of a deal when people already use 1930s cars, but would become a much bigger and bigger deal in the decades after WWII when cars and engines become increasingly complex and people don't expect to be removing major engine components after 5,000 miles.

With germanys lack of petrol, they relied heavily on alternative fuel sources.

trivia: The US had plenty of gasoline during the war, but they had to ration gasoline because they were short of rubber for tires. So it goes.

I had no idea these were actually made in significant numbers.

>even a modern woodmobile requires up to 10 minutes to get up to working temperature

That was my first question, and I can't imagine it would be great to have a parking garage of these things warming up / outputting gasses for 10 min each.

You don't run these inside enclosed spaces, because the carbon monoxide would kill you.

It's nowhere near as convenient as gasoline--there's plenty of minding and care required--but during hard times it's much more efficient and convenient than hauling a truck load of stuff by horseback, or walking. A wood gas spark engine runs much more efficiently than an equivalent steam engine, for example.

The difference back then is everything was carbureted and switching over to wood gas was relatively simple. With today's extremely complex fuel injected vehicles it will be a whole different story.

Converting the wood to charcoal before use has been found to be the most reliable method of burning wood by most users, with lowest contamination/fouling risk, although the owner of the http://www.driveonwood.com forum (a guy from Springville, Alabama) runs his truck on straight hardwood and has put many miles on it like that.

When in good tune, a full size pickup truck will go about a mile per pound of wood.

Well yes, I did read the article ...

Well I didn't. I just spent years reading others' accounts, and am reporting from my own experience also. (Shocker, I know.) Now you have two people telling you the same thing, I guess.

A turbocharger/blower would dramatically improve everything, assuming you could get it to survive the operating conditions.

https://youtube.com/shorts/4MQGP5MME2A

It works well if you use the turbo to feed air to the gasifier, creating a positive-pressure fuel system. Pulling from the gasifier runs the risk of fouling the turbo with tar and particulate, unless your operating conditions and filtration are perfect, which they rarely are. The danger in running positive pressure is that any leaks downstream of the gasifier could be emitting large amounts of carbon monoxide. If you can modulate exhaust pressure to the turbine then you can use the turbo to just overcome the pressure drop of the gasifier and filter without creating any extra pressure.

I didn't know about this, and initially suspected the article was an LLM-generated prank (photos and all). Now I entered the rabbit hole of water gas, wood gasification, Gustav Bischof, Lowe's gas... HN is such a great place of the Internet!

Some more terms for your enjoyment:

* Blau Gas

* Fischer-Tropsch process

* Bergius process

Here are some more terms used 'in the day': Coal gas, city gas, wood gas

> If, one day, the availability of (cheap) oil comes to an end, the omnipresence of the automobile will be history.

I think the years since this was written has shown this to be false. BEVs are steadily replacing ICE vehicles and we have more cars than ever.

Electrics won’t replace ICE until the range issues in cold weather is figured out.

It will be a non-issue with the inevitable additional (charging) infrastructure roll-outs along with mandates for on-board heat-pump battery management.

Just look at what Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_N... has done in just 20 years and let's just say it's not known for its warm climate.

Vast majority of worlds population doesn't live in places where cold weather range is a problem. Even where it is, cold weather range is a 3 month inconvenience of having to charge more often.

Yeas sure there are use cases where gasoline is more convenient than BEV. But just because the usecase is relevant for you doesn't mean it's globally relevant in the big picture.

Also how much people are ready take inconvenience depends how much they have to pay for the luxury of using gas. Even ignoring the global warming aspect, the EROI of oil drilling is plummeting. We'll never run out oil, it will just get more and more expensive as the easy sources of oil are all used...

Tell that to the Norwegians.

Not only in cold weather. Good luck trailing something big for a long distance even in the summer. In my model X the range is reduced to hardly 150 miles. Really inconvenient.

What do you mean by trailing? Like, driving on a trail? Like an off road one? Why would you do that in a Model X?

Probably pulling a trailer for a long distance.

This is like the argument that LED traffic lights are bad because they don't get hot enough to melt snow on them.

It's something that doesn't matter most of the time and when it does matter you use something else. LED traffic lights started getting built with heaters in them.

Then it looks like it is figured out because BEV is replacing combustion at an ever increasing rate.

It is figured out though. Pre-heat the battery, or drive a little while before charging. A fast charging stop will significantly heat up the battery, heat that can then be transferred to the cabin.

I live in Norway and for most people, EVs are an improvement during cold weather in my opinion. They get warm inside much faster, drive better, and while the range is obviously a lot lower, it isn’t a deal breaker if you buy a good EV.

EV wouldn’t represent 97% of new car sales in Norway if they were worse in the cold IMHO. The country put incentives but they are phased out and many people don’t mind paying a lot.

EVs are better than ICE in term of local emissions, however they do not solve all environmental issues.

The answer is fewer cars and more shared transportation. People always mention lack of public transport possibilities, affordability and rentability but the offer would develop immediately and would be much more efficient than what we have now if private passenger motorized vehicles weren't allowed as it would reduce the overall traffic significantly if only emergency, public and good transports were allowed.

Related, Colin Furze experimented with using wood gas to run an IC engine, somewhat successfully: https://youtu.be/FK2qK-NCQH8

I remember John Cohn, an IBM Computer Engineer, was on some TV show called The Colony and built one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkH6mFlfH3o and I seem to remember it getting much further than this clip.

I wonder if a wood powered tractor for farming would be more practical than a wood powered car for transportation

Check out http://www.driveonwood.com to see plenty of examples of both. A wood car or truck can be amazingly practical for any use involving long steady state (i.e. highway driving), not so much for city use.

A tractor can certainly work well on wood gas.

I think it would, the only problem being smaller row crop farmers who would be mostly likely benefit to implement it or want to implement it have been pushed out of agriculture more and more over the decades and struggle to survive at all. Which makes spending time and money on experimental work like this far less likely.

In the sense of a farmer being more likely to have access to a local supply of firewood, and that tractors are probably more used for longer stretches at a time than running down to the grocery store, sure.

Historically, they weren't that common, as large-scale use of wood gas was mostly a thing in Europe during WWII, and during that period continental European agriculture was still mostly horse-driven. After WWII when agricultural mechanization really picked up, fuel was again available so there was no big motivation to put up with the disadvantages of wood gasifiers.

Alright, for those who want a big dump of practical knowledge on building and operating small-scale gasifiers here's the old GEK wiki:

http://wiki.gekgasifier.com/w/page/6123718/FrontPage

Be warned, there are a myriad of reasons this technology never became commercially successful for modern applications.

Amusingly(?), the Juha Sipilä character mentioned in the article later became prime minister in Finland from 2015-2019.

wood gas is still explosive gas. be careful; but it does work, for things you'd use propane for, at greatly reduced efficiency and probably longevity of any moving parts. with wide variance. including your lungs.

One of the BBC series covered this, I think it was Wartime Farm.

The title made me wonder if you could actually put wood in the fuel tank and heat the tank to generate wood gas. Turns out no, you need more than that.

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