Wood Gas - The Future Biomass-Derived Fuel 2

How wood gas is made? When you heat wood it is pyrolysed, i.e. all the tars vaporize. When you add some oxygen, the carbon bound within the wood cells is burnt to carbon dioxide. The vapors burn too. When those burnt gasses pass through a layer of very hot char, they are reduced to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. A small amount of methane is also produced. When the gas is cooled and cleaned of any tars and particles, it can be used in internal combustion engine, boiler or any other device!

What do you need to produce your own wood gas? You'd need a device that's called gasifier. It consists of fuel hopper, gasifying chamber and a set of filters. It's very easy to build, the people during WWII made it out of old water heaters and stuff like that.


by: Krzysztof Lis

Wood Gas - The Future Biomass-Derived Fuel

Let's assume, that you own a farm. You produce grain and have a lot of straw. You'd like to make your energy on site from the biomass you have available. You might plant your fields with rapeseed or canola and produce biodiesel. But you'd need to get methanol and lye first, since both of them can't be made there! And you can use your biodiesel only in compression ignition (diesel) engines. And what if you have an old genset powered by spark-ignition (gasoline / petrol) engine? I think I might have a solution for you...

You'll make use of a technology that's more than 200 years old. It's greatest development took place during World War II in 1940s in Europe. At that time most of petroleum-derived fuels were used by military and there was no fuel left for civilians. So they made their own fuel, the wood gas from wood or charcoal. In some countries 95% of civilian transport (trucks, buses, even fishermen's boats) were fueled with this gas.

What is this wood gas? From chemical point of view it's a mixture of combustible carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen (H2) and methane (CH4), dilluted with some water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2). This gas can be easily used for almost every internal combustion engine. Well... except for the most modern ones, they'd require to have their electronics to be modified.

by: Krzysztof Lis