Wood Gas Wizard Would you believe wood chunks can power a truck? Take a ride with Wayne Keith, who uses wood gas to fuel everything from daily driving to heavy-duty farm work to breaking speed records. By Richard Freudenberger April/May 2012 inShare Wayne-Keith-Wood-Stove There’s a wood gasification sensation in Alabama, where Wayne Keith hasn’t used more than a few gallons of gasoline since 2004, thus saving about $40,000. PHOTO: RICHARD FREUDENBERGER Previous Wayne-Keith-Wood-Stove Wood-Chunker-Feeding-Wood Scrap-Wood-For-Wood-Gas-Engine Wood-Gas-Truck Next Content Tools Print Email Comments Related Content Making Hay With Wood Gas Hay season on the Keith farm means lots of work for the wood-powered truck! Check out these videos o... Use a Wood Gas Generator to Power Your Truck If you have an older-model truck, a ready supply of firewood and a little ingenuity, you can build a... MAX Wins 800-Mile Road Rally, Without Gas Using straight vegetable oil for fuel, Jack McCornack and MAX took first prize in the Escape from Be... Men in Black Keeping the project going is my goal. Back in 2004, Wayne Keith drew a line in the sand at $1.50. That’s the price at which the Alabama native would no longer buy a gallon of gasoline. Keith, who makes his living raising cows, growing hay and milling timber in a small town about 30 miles northeast of Birmingham, wasn’t bluffing. He knew he had an alternative fuel in his backyard: the hundreds of pounds of scrap wood he generates every time he runs his sawmill. Since 2004, Keith has powered his trucks with wood. Sound strange? Trust me, this is no pipe dream. Many years ago, when I managed the MOTHER EARTH NEWS research facilities in North Carolina, we built wood-powered vehicles for the same reasons Keith does today. But Keith has taken wood gasification well beyond what I could’ve imagined. This unassuming, down-to-earth farmer is an energy and transportation pioneer, with more than 250,000 miles of wood gas driving under his belt and about $40,000 saved by using wood chunks instead of gasoline. “My Dodge Dakota truck gets about 5,200 miles per cord,” Keith says in his easygoing Southern drawl. (A cord is a common measurement for wood, meaning a wood stack 4 feet deep by 4 feet high by 8 feet long.) “I paid for my farm in the early 1990s by selling wood at $27 per cord. Today a cord costs about $50 [wholesale] in this area. I burn scrap wood from my sawmill, but if I had to buy wood, I could still travel for less than a penny a mile.” For comparison, if gasoline costs $3.50 a gallon, your vehicle would have to achieve nearly 350 miles per gallon for its driving cost to be a penny per mile. 4 Reasons for Wood Gas The idea of powering vehicles with wood or other biomass energy is nothing new. Trucks, cars, motorcycles, boats, tractors and even airplanes have been adapted to burn wood. By the end of World War II, when there were critical shortages of petroleum, there were more than 1 million wood gas civilian vehicles operating in Asia and Europe. After the energy crisis of the late 1970s, MOTHER EARTH NEWS revisited wood gas as a homegrown fuel option. We had heard from several readers who’d built their own wood gasifiers. Eventually, we had all of these running on wood gas: a Chevy pickup, a sawmill, and a 12.5-kilowatt electric generator for remote power. But why would anyone want to use wood for motor fuel? 1. Abundant Biomass. Wood is biomass that, well, literally grows on trees. In many areas, there are more wood resources than you can shake a stick at. And you don’t need firewood splits to do this — small branches, construction tailings and other wood scraps make the best fuel. 2. Wood Is Carbon-Neutral. Unlike coal or petroleum, which become environmental problems when they are extracted, refined and burned, a tree absorbs carbon dioxide from the air as it grows. When a tree dies, whether it is burned or left to rot, the carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere. Read more: motherearthnews/green-transportation/wood-gas-zm0z12amzroc.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_content=07.05.13+GEGH&utm_campaign=2013+GEGH&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email#ixzz2YN72TNUi
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 14:49:40 +0000
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