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55 Comments
- gbudavid, on 06/27/2009, -2/+26FTA The technology is called gasification, and it's been around since the 1800s, when it was used for street lamps and cooking. It even powered some vehicles during World War II, but faded away under oil's dominance.
- williepepper, on 06/28/2009, -0/+12My car runs on a rubber band.
Just back it up a few blocks and whaaaam, watch it go! - Barackalypse, on 06/28/2009, -1/+11Just because one man can do something doesn't mean its actually practical for 100 million people to start doing it. Besdies, do you really want to start off your morning by loading 25 pounds of dirty wood into your cars for the daily commute?
- gamerfreak1203, on 06/28/2009, -8/+17THE SMOKE MUST BE TERRIBLE
- brownsound00, on 06/28/2009, -3/+12DON'T BURY HIM! IT'S CAPS LOCK FOR BILLY MAYS
- ousthouse, on 06/28/2009, -1/+8Fears of over logging was a major reason car manufacturers to shift to gas powered engines in the first place.
- tasine, on 06/28/2009, -0/+6Sounds interesting, but I wouldn't enjoy lugging the burner around on my car, and I wonder how many cords of wood one would have to carry in order to drive a couple of hundred miles. Would someone have to be continually feeding the burner?
- rockstar1o9, on 06/28/2009, -0/+6How much longer til we can attach a Mr. Fusion?
- inactive, on 06/28/2009, -0/+5Cool. All I'd need is a bottle of Fiber Choice, some greesy Mexican food, and a preinstalled toilet in my seat. We can make it into a cross-country trip.
- doctechnical, on 06/28/2009, -1/+6Spare me the conspiracy BS, unless you can provide evidence that the Big Scary Oil Companies have enough influence to tell China and Russia not to use these technologies.
Take off the tin-foil hat already. - SwiftKick34, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4So if it needs a pound for every two miles or so, do you need to stop every few miles and shovel some more biomass into the reactor?
- goeric, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4Pretty sure if the entire world switched to this method we'd be doomed.
- doctechnical, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4Depends on the temp and what kind of wood you're burning. HELLO THIS IS BILLY MAYS FOR THE COMBO MEAT SMOKER AND ALTERNATE FUEL SYSTEM.
- tratten, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4Wrong!
Maybe you should read a bit about fossil fuel vs. biofuel.
Wood is part of the carbon cycle. (The tree has absorbed CO2 to make its wood. No CO2 added to, or removed from the cycle.)
Burning fossil fuel just adds CO2 to the cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_fuel - omegaredIX, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4Sounds great now we can just chop down every tree in the forest so we can drive our cars....
- doctechnical, on 06/28/2009, -0/+4Modern wood-burning furnaces have been dealing with this issue for decades, make wood pellets and feed them into the burner with an electrically driven belt. Hardly rocket science.
- inactive, on 06/28/2009, -0/+3Smells a lot like a modified Sterling engine. Anything that makes heat drives those.
- piemcgee, on 06/28/2009, -0/+3Gotta love them Oregonians
- Litespeed, on 06/28/2009, -1/+4Check out the "Tree Powered Car" episode of Planet Mechanics (it's on BT). They modified a Toyota pickup to run on the gas from a wood fire.
- GDLaws, on 06/28/2009, -6/+9Still burning Carbon based Fuels... Not going to help anything. Just because its vaporization instead of combustion doesn't change the fact that it releases CO2.
SORRY FORGOT CAPS FOR BILLY, BUT NOT RETYPING THIS. - doctechnical, on 06/28/2009, -0/+3The article said he was getting max two miles per pound of wood. Just to put that in perspective, you'd have to be getting fewer than 12MPG out of a gasoline engine to have a worse fuel-weight to milage ratio (based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations).
- piemcgee, on 06/28/2009, -0/+3*****.
- Mothrog, on 06/29/2009, -0/+3Yeah, nobody ever sells biodiesel or runs their car on straight vegetable oil.
- Killbot2015, on 06/29/2009, -0/+2Instantly dugg for Back To The Future reference.
- Taiyoryu, on 06/28/2009, -0/+2Hauling the burner didn't make much sense to me, either. It'd be much more practical to have the burner located at a fueling station (or large-scale production facility) where people can exchange tanks similar to the way they do for propane gas tanks for grills. Another option would be a gas line to the home for home fueling.
- erkokite, on 06/28/2009, -0/+2He's from Connecticut.
- scotchw, on 06/28/2009, -0/+2Apparently Dave Collins (AP Writer) didn't understand it either...
Quote:
The end products of the process are a little bit of ash, carbon dioxide and water, he said. He also claims there's little or no carbon footprint. - munehiro, on 06/28/2009, -0/+2it does, but that CO2 was trapped into the waste (eg. tree) not so long ago. It's clearly different from burning coal or oil, as that is carbon that was fixated millions of years ago. If you plant a tree, let it grow, and then burn it, your total CO2 footprint is zero, because the tree fixated the CO2 into cellulose that you then burn to make CO2 again. Oil, on the other hand, is "concentrated tree" which holds carbon that before burning was under the soil, and after burning is in the atmosphere. It's still zero footprint, if you check against millions of year, but that's what we want to prevent: having the same CO2 amount we had millions of years ago.
- s73v3r, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1I'd say at least til 2015.
- phishneslo, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1i think the fed should take all its newly purchased manufacturing capacity and use it to turn the fleet of postal delivery vehicles into plug-in-electrics with regenerative-breaking. they are all stop-and-go, all day long, and it would give GM and Chrysler some good practice.
- AnalogAssassin, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1I live in south Louisiana, and we have lots of sugarcane fields. The byproduct of sugarcane is this fibrous, stinky substance called bagasse. I bet that stuff would be great for running cars. Some of the sugar plants use bagasse to generate their own electricity.
- cuoops, on 06/28/2009, -1/+2This is old tech. I was watching Discovery in Amsterdam and they showed these two guys building one of these. They called in an expert from Switzerland or somewhere to get it running...and they did.
- jgubbe, on 06/29/2009, -0/+1http://www.charlotteobserver.com/136/story/803988. ...
FOR PICTURES VISIT ABOVE LINK. - vargasmas, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1Good Lord people! Did ya read the whole article? Biomass is not only wood. Any biological material would work. Yard clippings, leaves, dog poop, etc. Yes, it produces a little CO2, but so do people when they exhale and cows when they fart. Let's not let the environmentalists help the big oil companies by helping bury any new technology that can reduce our dependence on oil. I wish more people would try to innovate like this instead of quietly going with what our marketing overlords tell us.
- Gough50, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1I live in northern Idaho and drive back and forth to my rural shop on 25+ acres of woods most days. Rather than working the extra hours to pay for gas, I could spend the time thinning my woodlot. Sounds like a good deal to me.
- inactive, on 06/28/2009, -0/+1Wonder how much this guy is gonna be bought out for?
- meed, on 06/29/2009, -0/+1Instead of vehicles, how about using this type of engine to produce electricity? I bet all kinds of waste products could be burned including sewage sludge, waste from the manufacturing of bio fuels, and other non toxic materials that might otherwise fill up a land fill. I just hope that it isn't used as a method to burn coal.
- drumlinejunkie, on 06/29/2009, -0/+125 pounds isn't very much.
I'd rather load 25 pounds of dirty wood than a 25 pound screaming child. - charlietuna, on 06/28/2009, -1/+2Would this engine perhaps be made of silver? I think you meant Stirling.
- jotatmo, on 06/29/2009, -0/+1good work. let's make more.
- inactive, on 06/29/2009, -0/+1Welcome to....North Korea
- jwhyte3, on 06/28/2009, -3/+3Make it run on hemp and the smoke would be delicious! Plus you'd save the environment from slash/ burn mentality associated with trees as fuel.
- munehiro, on 06/28/2009, -0/+0why ?
- CJ117, on 06/28/2009, -4/+4Not if it runs on cannabis!
- Kumah, on 06/28/2009, -2/+2BILLY MAYS WAS AWESOME.
- jgubbe, on 06/29/2009, -1/+1PICTURES HERE,
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/136/story/803988. ... - megleigh13, on 06/29/2009, -0/+0There's a difference between burning waste wood that would decompose to CO2 if left to rot anyway, and cutting and burning timber that would otherwise be storing carbon for the lifetime of the tree. Few people would advocate cutting virgin timber for such a use as transportation, but there are vast quantities of "waste" wood (not to mention grass and lawn clippings) that are burned or left to rot that could be utilized for energy. For more info, see this article and responses (if you have access to Science magazine): DOI: 10.1126/science.1166214
- Shanich, on 06/28/2009, -2/+2 They were doing this in the 1800's just like the original internal combustion engine ran off alchohol , and the original diesel engine ran on vegetable oil , but guess who bought them all off or killed them ?
- Skuzzlbut, on 06/28/2009, -2/+2Just brilliant - some dude in CT can get this going and Detroit has its head so far up its own ass, we are arguing over getting 35 miles/gallon
- AnalogAssassin, on 06/28/2009, -0/+0Are you on dope?
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