Woodgas/Biogas vs DIY Electric

If you wanted to drive on the cheap would you go with Woodgas or do a DIY EV Vehicle?

Thats kind of an oxymoron isnt it, because the batteries alone will be thousands of dollars. Then a grand or two for the motor, then even more money for all the other bits. So lots of up front costs, but to pay for the electricity would be cheap, then the only other question would be - How long would the batteries last before you need to spend more thousands of dollars on batteries.

That is why every time I think about what I want to do I lean towards Woodgas. I read that the one farmer could go 3000 miles on a cord of wood, that for him is free, but would cost him $50 if he were to buy it locally. Be alright out in the sticks, but for in city driving, and winter driving, that is what I ponder. Will the power be there if I select the right vehicle, like a V8 Dakota or a V10 Ram, or go 454 Chevy or 429/460 Ford.

Diesel, and run recycled bio fuel made from discarded veg oil from resturants deep fat fryers.
One entrant drove the XAustralia alternate fuel race in a Toyota pick up fueled on a mix of old engine oil and water !

markz said:

If you wanted to drive on the cheap would you go with Woodgas or do a DIY EV Vehicle?

Thats kind of an oxymoron isnt it, because the batteries alone will be thousands of dollars. Then a grand or two for the motor, then even more money for all the other bits. So lots of up front costs, but to pay for the electricity would be cheap, then the only other question would be - How long would the batteries last before you need to spend more thousands of dollars on batteries.

That is why every time I think about what I want to do I lean towards Woodgas. I read that the one farmer could go 3000 miles on a cord of wood, that for him is free, but would cost him $50 if he were to buy it locally. Be alright out in the sticks, but for in city driving, and winter driving, that is what I ponder. Will the power be there if I select the right vehicle, like a V8 Dakota or a V10 Ram, or go 454 Chevy or 429/460 Ford.

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Compared to some solar panels and an EV, wood gas is infinitely more effort and makes poisonous gases. 3000 miles on a cord of wood is just bullshit, as is most of the wood-gas legends/claims. It was used for a very short period in Germany and a few other countries when impoverished and lacking all other fuel sources. You will notice the moment ANY other fuel sources became available, they stopped wood-gas entirely.

Hillhater said:

Diesel, and run recycled bio fuel made from discarded veg oil from resturants deep fat fryers.
One entrant drove the XAustralia alternate fuel race in a Toyota pick up fueled on a mix of old engine oil and water !

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The worlds largest and most dirty engines (large marine transport) also run on bunker oil, which is a step down even from old motor oil. The water was not providing even 1 joule of useful energy in that process, and the heavy metals in oil engine oil and long-chain partially combusted hydrocarbons must have made that vehicle a rolling environmental disaster in pickup form.


Essentially, if you can skip processes that spray things you wouldn't want to breath (aka, carbon monoxide from wood gas or nasty carcinogenic hydrocarbons and heavy metals from motor oil, or partially combusted fryer grease etc) then the process has a shot as being sustainable rather than just a different kind of poisoning mechanism.

As always you make great points LFP.

In your estimate then, how far do these wood gassers go on a cord of wood?
If its even half that, say 1500 miles or even a 1000 miles on a cord of wood, it would still be worth it to those who do not care about the enviromental aspect. Woodgas is less powerful too. It seems like a ton of work to make up the contraption.

I have not looked but I'd think that most restaurants already got a bio diesel guy lined up. I still see oil tanks behind restaurants.

liveforphysics said:

Compared to some solar panels and an EV, wood gas is infinitely more effort and makes poisonous gases. 3000 miles on a cord of wood is just bullshit, as is most of the wood-gas legends/claims. It was used for a very short period in Germany and a few other countries when impoverished and lacking all other fuel sources. You will notice the moment ANY other fuel sources became available, they stopped wood-gas entirely.

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I noticed you're closer to the pole than California, but solar is so cheap these days it seems crazy not to go that way even if you have to buy double the panels to compensate for low light exposure in winter compared with messing around splitting, loading and unloading a single cord of wood (used to be my job as a kid with only a woodstove for heat in Washington state growing up). I am perfectly content never harvesting, splitting, stacking, loading or carrying fire wood again.

For a couple grand you could have panels that would be someone giving you some pile of wood everyday, but you don't have to split or stack it or load it, and when you want to use it, it's instantly available day or night at the flick of a switch (assuming you're putting it into something with a battery, EV or home energy battery or whatever IF you're off the grid, if you're not off the grid and want to reduce costs you can just grid-tie and your solar energy all gets used if you have a battery or not).

Ok, sure that would be best for the planet,..
......but the original question was ....."transport on the cheap"..
Solar panels, batteries, EV conversion , etc etc are never going to be as cheap as an old diesel. (VW would probably pay you to take one away at the moment !)
....and there are many more deep fat friers around than there are eco fuel users.
...and that is far more practical than woodgas or methane generator etc etc.

Woodgas is hydrogen (H2) that i produced by heating dry wood in a very specific set of conditions. Cellulose is similar to a variety of other hydrocarbons, a lot of carbons in a chain, each holding some hydrogen molecules captive.

Hydrogen has a wide flammability ratio, meaning that if gasoline (98% C8/H18, called octane, for 8 carbons) needs to be in a ratio to air that is fairly close to 14:1 to even ignite. If the mix is too rich or too lean, you can't get it to ignite. H2 is different, if there is any air at all nearby, a spark will get a flame from H2. It is called H2 because in its singular molecular form, it is unstable, and it "wants" to achieve stability. If there is any H1 nearby, they will combine to form a molecule that has two individual hydrogen atoms in a very strong bond, forming H2.

With woodgas, you are burning H2, which is weak compared to burning diesel or gasoline. By that I mean, you need to feed woodgas to a V8 to get 2-cylinder performance. That being said, its a "top ten" fuel for the apocalypse, since you don't have to be precise with it.

liveforphysics said:

It was used for a very short period in Germany and a few other countries when impoverished and lacking all other fuel sources.

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Here in Europe we call this period WW2 ...


http://www.fao.org/docrep/t0512e/T0512e00.htm

If somebody gave you the wood, it might make sense. If your land produced that much that you had to cut the wood anyway, just to keep the next fire from burning your house, and you have nothing else to do with all that wood. Chip it and mulch would be choice one to get rid of brushy wood.

But it seems to make sense to use that dirty fuel to heat the house, that far north, rather than try to drive around on it. Get a good stove, that burns as completely as possible.

But sure, after the crash sends the world back to animal power and the dark ages, running a tractor on wood gas would make total sense. That desperate, of course you'd convert what you had to wood gas. But that crash in my lifetime is not happening IMO. I kind of doubt we will actually run out of oil or oil substitutes for quite some time. Running out of time to get away with fossil fuel yes, but not running out of the fuel.

A cord of pine wood has 15 million BTU/hours of energy. That's 4400 kilowatt hours. A gasifier can convert 75% of that to usable fuel, leaving 3300Kw/k. A conventional motor is 1.5 times less efficient burning wood gas, so a 40% efficient motor would only be 27% efficient, so 891 kilowatt hours would reach the road for each.
(my sources http://forestry.usu.edu/htm/forest-products/wood-heating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas)

The first source of watthours per mile that I found was the EPA rating for the Tesla model S of 0.3Kw/m
So if you put those numbers together, you get 1 cord of wood producing enough power for 2970 miles.

Unfortunately, that would work out to something like 100 miles per gallon. We already know the efficiency of the gas motor took a huge hit switching to wood gas. If you got 40mpg before, you would now get 27mpg equivalent, and that's only if the vehicle weighed the same and had the same aerodynamics. But it will be much heavier, and all that gasifier equipment is going to hurt the aerodynamics. Reality is going to be in the hundreds of miles, not thousands.

I'd like to see more real world numbers for woodgas/syngas IC

I think likely start/stop driving is a huge issue with woodgas generation on vehicle. The gasifiers do require fairly prepped wood as well. But if you could harvest and compress the methane it would be similar to an lpg or cng vehicle.

Either way, if 'cheaper' = 'less money', then woodgas wins. . . provided you don't count time and resources for the wood and prep.

I would be more prone to a gasifier for stationary power generation alongside what made sense for solar/wind/water/gravity. For driving, anything that doesn't run off of shit provided by the mega corporations and mined from deep in the earth would be a win though imo. I'd take some inconvenience and work over that.
Once you run that mindset towards a conclusion you won't be scootin around quite as frivilously, and you might find animal and/or plant products work nicely to self-provide fuel, or in some cases syngas or diesel derived from wood.

BTW LFP, burning wood (whether a campfire, stove, or gasifier) does not release any more 'harmful poisons' into the closed system than the same amount of wood left to rot. It really is a closed system, which can be very comforting instead of worring about inevitable death by human physical degradation.

IMO taking from easily accessible things is more renewable and clean than mining and refining.

True about rotting wood, but try to tell somebody their beloved compost pile is a greenhouse gas polluter. They will refuse to believe it. They want to plant a tree, to suck up some of that carbon, but someday that tree does die, and when it rots methane is released, a powerful greenhouse gas.

So go ahead and heat the house with wood, just use a stove that combusts as completely as possible to help avoid dirty smoke going out into the local air. Only real way to sequester that woods carbon/methane, is to make lumber out of it and build houses or furniture or whatever with it. Then it does not rot so soon.

But at least if you heat your house, or make other use of recently captured carbon, it's kind of a closed system of carbon. Mine the coal, and you are digging up additional carbon and injecting it into the no longer closed system.

But,,, you also can't just over rely on recent vegetative carbon for fuel, or you turn your area into Hati or Madagascar, completely defoliated.

Rotting and burning wood emit very different chemicals - this couldn't be more obvious...

different chemicals

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The end result is the same. In our closed system. As DD points out though, responsible/conservative/sustainable use of even the easily accessible energy must still be practiced.

Imo it's alot easier to measure/track/balance that sort of material manipulation compared to the amounts of elements that grow almost incomprehensible we mine/refine from below.

That's an interesting thought about sequestering wood by using for building. We do alot of that!
I wonder where all the carbon comes from for billions of people that now exist and the things such as wood that we hold out of the loop for long term wood products.

More Carbon and Co2 are needed, for more living things! I guess mining does help that!?

One way to look at it.

Climate change may suck for humans and their homes locations, for crops in places we like to farm now. But without a doubt, plants that are in a currently wet place, or the sea algae, love the CO2 in the atmosphere. The air is the source of the CO2 in that wood.

Burning it releases the carbon back to the air. one type of gas. Compost does indeed release a very different gas. It has some carbon in it of course, but not as much as burning it. Obviously to any child, most of the carbon in your compost pile remains in that pile, to nourish your garden. What's not obvious is that the compost pile releases methane. That is a far more powerful green house gas than CO2. But anything that grows will rot, whether you put it in your garden compost or not. That's the catch 22. But I know a shitload of highly educated people that think there is nothing greener than their compost pile. Makes em happy, to do their part for the globe. While in truth, burning the compost pile could actually be less impact on climate change, or at least not much worse. Drying those leaves, bagging them, then landfilling them could actually sequester that carbon, or at least greatly slow the release.

This methane release is also a major problem with animal production, cow and pig farts release incredible amounts of methane. Cows in particular fart a lot, with their multi stomach digestion system. Methane is the elephant in the room most don't want to talk about. Personally, I'm not ready to stop eating meat to save the planet. I did my part big time though, by not reproducing.

You bring up an interesting point about the significance of dug up carbon. Since I'm waiting on a woman and that might take---well, I'll type with my thumbs a bit.

So, Northern Mexico. Its estimated that it now has about %2 of the trees it did when Spain first set out to clearcut the area. That's right, for each one now there were 50. And that was after the American Indians had mostly clear cut the North American continent by the 1300's. The mini iceage was triggered by the unencumbered grow after the 75+ million population had fallen to 2.5 to 4 million. I wonder how many trees there were before the year 1000. Since they were mostly burned, where indeed did the carbon go all those centuries?

And is there a point where we might sequester too much carbon?

I thought the mini ice age of the 1300's was thought to be from a fluctuation in the sun. And the crash in population came later I thought, when Europeans brought the smallpox, and measles. The Puritans found Massachusetts nicely depopulated and ready for colonization, after others fishing the grand banks brought the smallpox to the area.

I never heard anything about native americans clear cutting north America. Am I misunderstanding? There was a huge population before the smallpox came, and they did clear large areas to grow corn and squash east of the mississippi. But hardly a clear cut of North America. They cleared the good bottom land only. Out west the climate is harsher, drier, and the populations never got to quite the size of the east in most areas. California the exception of course. Primarily hunter gather existence out west.

The first cut of the western timber by us white immigrants was harvesting trees that were often as old as 1000 years, and in some cases 2000+. So not a second growth since 1300. Of course, plenty of wood got cut near places like Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde, locally. Some areas certainly clear cut, but not the harder to get to places.

nutspecial said:

different chemicals

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The end result is the same.

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If you were left in a box with a stick, over time fungus would decompose it, bacteria decomposes the fungus remains, some methane is released, some CO2 is released. You would live through it.

If you put the stick into a wood gas generator your design goal is to make an unmetered amount of toxic carbon monoxide for your engine to burn, and do achieve this you put ash particulates, partially decomposed wood tars, etc into the box, you're going to die coughing.

Many/most humans seem to have a familiarity and comfort level with burning things for energy. This will conclude if our race is to continue inhabiting close loop environments like earth.

Wood gas is weak per fuel volume. It take s a LOT of wood to make a usable amount of gas. Then, hydrogen is not very energy dense, meaning you have to feed hydrogen to a V8 to get the same performance as a 2-cylinder. There are several processes to produce wood gas, and some are dirty. Wood gas is not popular because its a colossal PITA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

Steam-gasification processes typically yield high hydrogen contents

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the gas composition is strongly dependent on the gasification process

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Exhaust gas emission from an internal combustion engine is significantly lower on wood gas than on petrol.[8] Especially the HC emissions are low on wood gas.[9] A normal catalytic converter works well with wood gas, but even without it, emission levels less than 20 ppm HC and 0.2% CO can be easily achieved by most automobile engines. Combustion of wood gas generates no particulates, and the gas renders thus very little carbon black amongst motor oil

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Yeah Dauntless, I don't know, but more things 'existing' need more carbon to exist in the first place, since it's a closed system. And if matter is energy, there is never really any more or less. But I still don't even quite understand how and where the accumulated daytime heat goes, at night? Not into the earth? Not convection into space? Not via visable light? What type of heat radiates thru a vacuum?

As far as we can tell though, it's a 'closed system', not quite a box with you and a stick, but still a 'box'. That would have to include the 'universe' to some degree when it comes to heat/light, but not as much for what we're talking about, probably?

My simplified take: A rotting log ends up as fumes + dirt. A burnt log ends up as smoke + ash.

Since 'what goes up must come down', I submit the processes are similar enough within a reasonable time as long as the smoke (or fumes of course) aren't concentrated enough at any point so as to choke life out. So I don't have it all figured out to scale, but starting with the best attainable personal balance of 'natural' living seems like the best start. I like the smell of wood smoke, and it can even be useful. I'm also reminded how nature tends to burn itself down from time to time via fully natural processes we don't fully grasp. . .

Yes SM there's certainly room for improvement, and it wouldn't be my first choice to produce fuel onboard to 'get around'. But I really like how comparatively clean gasification can be to either of the two above, while also diy deriving unsequestered diesel and woodgas for direct heating and cooking or running internal combustion engines. Although modern wood heating devices use some 'rocket stove' techniques of gas reburning, gasifiers still aren't widespread and don't have much of a baseline.
When searching I did find some larger commercial versions, and like rocket stoves and rocket mass heaters there is a plethera of various diy attempts with varying success/efficiency/dependability.

Sidenote- how far could >1acre sustainably harvested go? Could it work for a family, and what type of investment would be needed to be independant in the first place?

nutspecial said:

But I still don't even quite understand how and where the accumulated daytime heat goes, at night? Not into the earth? Not convection into space? Not via visable light? What type of heat radiates thru a vacuum?

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So my understanding is that the socalled vacuum of space is much like inside your garage if you keep the door closed and ran the car engine. It's not completely without an atmosphere, it's just less dense than on a planet. I thought we did lose heat into space.

dogman dan said:

Am I misunderstanding?

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Oh, much. I don't know what to say about "Cleared the good bottom land," but they had a problem with making areas where they CONGREGATED uninhabitable. There was a community of over 100,000 living in the Cleveland area until shortly before the arrival of explorers. Between the clearing the nearby trees and no ability to transport courage over distances they're run out of wood and hunting grounds. They were also bad at sanitation so could lose an entire population to an epidemic. Squanto came home just a few years after he'd left to discover that his tribe had literally died off while he was gone. As mentioned, there was a crop in the field with noone to harvest it if the pilgrims hadn't shown up. Prior to the Aztecs there was another great civilization there but they died off. Montezuma told Cortes he was from what became New Mexico, but the community he spoke of was gone. You might find interesting to read (But I can't remember details to help you find it) there are theories about where the Mexica came from. I can't find it right now, I don't remember where, but t there is a site of apparent ruins theorized to be the former home of the Aztecs, somewhere north, such as Minnesota. Perhaps near one of the Great Lakes. They had to leave wherever because it would no longer support them, no clear explanation why.

There were two great epidemics in the 2 1/2 centuries leading to the arrival of Columbus, one being hanta virus. As it's documented that the Rus, aka 'Vikings' were making forays inland and trying to maintain colonies along the east coast as far back as 900, either smallpox or the plague could have come from Europe before Columbus.

And some of the hunter/gatherers of the west, as well as the predatory Apaches, were actually late arrivals. When the Spaniards arrived in California the people were dying off from malnutrition related maladies, though they'd come to blame the Europeans for the fact they were sick.

It's all a complex story how the Indians were dying off, I've only read pieces of it. It wasn't simply smallpox that wiped them out.

Sorry about the off topic, but thanks for explaining Dauntless. I wasn't sure when the mound builder culture had crashed, and assumed it was shortly after 1492, when Columbus brought smallpox and other European diseases to the islands. So maybe the better known smallpox die off was really a second one. Quite possible an earlier one started up north with a visit from the Vikings, or who knows what visitor from where. There are theories of outsiders visiting the Maya, who's population crashed centuries before the Aztec.

I did misunderstand, I thought you meant a deforestation of the entire NA. Deforestation of lots of the east and south east quite plausible. But even the Anazasi culture out here was never that huge a population. So most of the west was far from deforested. To be sure, the good wood near the pueblos got cut. But not deforested out west.

My Idea of real deforestation though, that took the introduction of goats and sheep, and draft animals to haul the wood away. The wheel.

.......But I still don't even quite understand how and where the accumulated daytime heat goes, at night?

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It goes back the same way it came in !. ...radiation.
Think how the Earth gets its heat,..from the Sun radiating heat from its hotter source across space to a cooler (Earth) that adsorbs it on the part facing the Sun (daytime)
At night that warmer surface of the earth is moved into shadow and radiates heat off to the cooler space.

....What type of heat radiates thru a vacuum?...

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......IR !

https://www.reference.com/science/heat-sun-reach-earth-4865aa02c34b381b

Hey, this is all material to the biogas issue. Even then the coming and going of trees was having a visible effect on the environment AND showing that merely renewable is not necessarily sustainable.

dogman dan said:

. . . . when Columbus brought smallpox and other European diseases to the islands.

I did misunderstand, I thought you meant a deforestation of the entire NA. Deforestation of lots of the east and south east quite plausible. But even the Anazasi culture out here was never that huge a population. So most of the west was far from deforested. To be sure, the good wood near the pueblos got cut. But not deforested out west.

My Idea of real deforestation though, that took the introduction of goats and sheep, and draft animals to haul the wood away. The wheel.

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There's isn't a "Better known" smallpox die off. There's pocket outbreaks, etc. There's the famous letter a British General wrote, which of course he later claimed was a "Joke," about solving the problem of some dangerous Indian tribes by passing out blankets contaminated with smallpox. When his replacement arrived shortly after he'd set the letter he was insisting the blankets had already been burned and he NEVER intended to do it for real, but why indeed would he write that in an official letter?

I'm sure there's material on estimates of the number of trees before 1000, around 1250, then at 1500. I wish I could find them. Europe had Kings and Nobles not letting the peasantry cut trees down wherever they could, which at least prevented the continent from being clear cut. I guess that supports the case for Autocracy in dealing with the environment.

One thing I haven't heard mentioned on these biogas cars is what indeed are the pollutants? Is there more vapor lost before the gas that reaches the engine than gasoline? What is the effect as compared to the evaporation we have now? What IS coming out the exhaust? Better or worse than we have now? Is there a way of cleaning up such an engine?

Becoming a smog mechanic I learned a bit about the emissions. In the 1950's if you didn't see the exhaustthere was much assumption that was more like carbon dioxide and the worst thing from the engine was the vapors coming from the crankcase. Then they start figuring out about hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and start with changes in the engines to reduce that. Whether they were just discovering other emissions they hadn't noticed before or creating them with the modifications was actually in question in materials we read for the test, but there was conjecture about the 70's-80's cars possibly being overall dirtier than before. But I was a lowly mechanic, not a researcher, I don't know the quality of the materials that were approved by the government for us to read. They were at least Politically Correct, right?

But now, had anyone even bothered to take a measurement on the exhaust of the woodgas car? Is our conventional smog testing equipment capable of simply reading any and every gas that might be there? The Touts online all claim woodgas is cleaner than gasoline, but the only proof they offer is there desire to CLAIM it's cleaner. . . .

http://makezine.com/2010/06/24/lost-knowledge-wood-gas-vehicles/

From Wikipedia:

the gas composition is strongly dependent on the gasification process

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So...there are many ways to get wood gas, and you are asking about the emissions? If you want clean emissions, it can be done with wood gas, however...if you are looking at wood gas as a post-apocalyptic fuel, you will be using the easiest, cheapest, and dirtiest process...

If you are looking at wood gas as a viable alternative right now? It is a HUGE PITA for a small benefit. If it was a great option, you'd see more hippies that are living off-grid doing it, and posting about how stupid we all are for not doing it. The machinery that you need to produce wood gas is easy and cheap to put together, so...why aren't YOU using wood gas?