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wood-burning vehicles are hard to come by

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So, I was reading “Rural North America” by Michael Tobis when I came across this claim:

Even in places that are sufficiently forested and unpopulated to draw on wood for energy, wood-burning vehicles are hard to come by, […]

I don’t dispute the claim that wood-burning vehicles are hard to come by in Rural North America. I merely wondered if they are common place anywhere and what they might look like. Naturally, I went to google. I found Beaver Energy

The Mercury Cougar XR7 had little measurable impact on the American automotive landscape, but the Cougar featured in TRANSLOGIC 64 is a little different–so much so that its owner even changed its name. Although “Beaver” is a strange moniker for a car, Chip Beam has a good reason for naming his ride after the trunk-chewing critter; after all, the Beaver XR7 runs on wood (or any other organic material) through a process called gasification.

I also found this hobby site by Australian Christians who discuss their wood burning vehicle. Their fuel economy appears to be 2km/kg. This seems similar to values quotes at green autoblog. Island breath suggests “their range is comparable to that of electric cars.”.

Meanwhile, if you do want a wood powered car, Beaver Energy has a category on Building Your Own Wood Powered Car. It looks like you’ll have to sacrifice trunk space to make room for the wood.

17 thoughts on “wood-burning vehicles are hard to come by”

  1. During WWII, the German military comandeered all fuel. Without conventional fuel, Sweden innovated to make wood gasifiers. 100,000 were built to run vehicles. See:

    GENGAS: THE SWEDISH CLASSIC ON WOOD FUELED VEHICLES: (SERI-1979) T. Reed, D. Jantzen and A. Das, with index. This is the “Old Testament” of gasification, written English translation, of “Gen-Gas”, written by the Swedish Royal Academy at the end of WW II after successfully converting 90% of transportation of WW II Sweden to wood gasifiers.
    ISBN 1-890607-01-0 340pp

    Tom Reed’s WoodGas.com is one of the best sites for gasifier and biomass info. See Reed’s Bookstore

    In South Africa, SG Johansson continued refining the gasifier. Johansson’s design is marketed by Carbo Consult.
    It is clean enough that Caterpillar will guarantee operation of their engines on the SGJ gasifier. (That is critically important, because otherwise > 90% of research gasifiers “rusting” in peace – full of tar in 1991 when I surveyed the field.)

    With the near term peaking of light oil and consequent shortages, wood gasifiers are likely to come back into vogue to keep some communities and businesses afloat. Strongly recommend reading Robert Hirsch, The Impending World Energy Mess – ISBN : 978-1926837116

  2. Wood for fuel?

    Hmmm…wonder if anyone’s tried that before.

    Blast furnaces creating pig iron emerged on large self-sufficient plantations in the mid-17th century to meet these demands, but production was expensive and labor-intensive: forges, furnaces, and waterwheels had to be constructed, huge swaths of forest had to be cleared and the wood rendered into charcoal, and iron ore and limestone had to be mined and transported. By the end of the 18th century, the threat of deforestation forced the English to use coke, a fuel derived from coal, to fire their furnaces. This was a practice that was later adopted in the US as well. This shift precipitated a drop in iron prices since the process no longer required enormous quantities of increasingly scarce wood.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_and_industrial_history_of_the_United_States

  3. The Stanley Steamer could be powered by wood. The Stanley brothers used to live in Kingfield Maine and my father often saw them drive by in their Stanley Steamer. When they were running low on steam, they used to just stop by the side of the road, gather some wood, throw it in the furnace, and off they went. Of course, things were somewhat different then – plenty of forest, dirt roads, and low population.

  4. Dear Lucia,

    If in the category of vehicles one includes locomotives, then to my certain knowledge there were still wood-burning steam locomotives operating on the railways between Zimbabwe and South Africa well into the 1990’s.

    You are entirely correct to point out that it takes a large volume of wood to create many Joules. Wood is gnarly and irregular in shape and diameter so its “stacking” efficiency is very poor compared even to coal, and ridiculously low compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

    Which is why even the White and Stanley steam automobiles normally ran on kerosene. Run a steamer on wood, and you have no room to carry anything else.

  6. Wood is the fuel of the impoverished just rich enough to not burn dry fecal matter. You wanna talk about pollution and stuff that’s bad for the environment, there’s your horrible energy source.

  7. There is a book by one of the two Danes who finding themselves impressed into the German army in WW2 were ordered to drive a wood-burning truck from Denmark into Germany. it starts well, (the trip, not the truck) but the problem of keeping the thing fed becomes overwhelming, “borrowing” wood from domestic fuel supplies, picking it up off the ground, chopping it, etc.

    No-one reading this book would ever think that this is a great idea.

    I apologize for not having a reference. I must have read this a long time ago.

  8. At one point there were coal powder fueled buses in use in Colombia, South America.
    Here is a link to some of the engineering on the idea dating back to 1927:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=ficDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=coal+powder+fueled+vehicles&source=bl&ots=78nXqYq0JD&sig=IqH5m0Lw7XfnbyPx9xLRjMusHJE&hl=en&ei=eVg1TunBKbCHsALogt2bDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

    These all seem to be gimmicky diversions. Only corn has grown in significance here, and that is only due to heavy subsidies.

  9. Wood is being used to heat large buildings in London:

    “As for wood, consider the effect of a simple rule passed by the London borough of Merton in 2003 and slavishly emulated by planners all over the country. The Merton rule requires all developers who build a building of more than 1,000 square metres to generate 10% of energy `renewably’ on site. The effect has been to make it worth my while to thin my woods in Northumberland for the first time in decades.

    How so? Faced with the need to find an energy source sufficiently dense to fit on site, developers have turned en masse to wood (or biomass as they prefer to call it). This has led to convoys of diesel lorries chugging through the streets of London to deliver wood to buildings – how very thirteenth century! Delivering, drying and burning this wood produces far more carbon dioxide than delivering gas would.

    And lo, by bidding up the price of wood, the effect has been to cause landowners to harvest their timber younger than before, which increases carbon emissions. Thus enriched by having lost less money in managing woods, people like me take a holiday – on a jet. So as policy own goals go, the Merton rule is a quintuple whammy. According to one estimate, Britain is producing about six million extra tonnes of carbon dioxide each year as a result of redirecting its wood supply from current use by the wood-panel and other related industries into energy supply.”

    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/quintuple-whammy

  10. Andrew FL
    Put the issues in perspective.
    It is not “impoverished vs rich”. The choice in WWII was between having wood gasification driven vehicles and walking. Lloyds of London and the US Dept of Defense are both warning of global shortages of transport fuels in the 2012 to 2015 time frame – with things getting worse after that. See
    Sustainable Energy Security, Lloyds 360 Risk Insight (2010) Chatham House
    Joint Operating Environment JOE 2010 US Joint Forces Command, DOD

    On emissions, the SJG gasifier scrubs the gas from tars and particulates. That is far cleaner than open cooking fires.

    Tom Reed’s WoodGas camp stoves (microgasifiers) similarly get ~ 40% efficiency vs 10-12% for open fires, and are very clean.

  11. They have a great advantage in that they are driving around some of the driest and least populated areas on the planet where dry wood can be found nearly all times of the year. It’s a great idea for outback Australia, or any arid/desert region which nevertheless has decent foilage to burn. They talk of >1000C needed to get a complete burn, can anyone guesstimate the emissions of such combustion? In terms of nitrates, CO, etc.

  12. Nano

    Having never been to the outback, I’m not going to dispute that these are a great idea in the outback. But, I’m a bit surprised to learn that there is lots of wood or foliage available in a dry location. Maybe it’s just “lots” relative to the very few people who live in the region and are prone to driving across?

    I lived in Richland, Washington which is in a relatively arid region. There is, in some sense, “lots” of tumbleweed and sage in the dry areas. That is: if you look around, you don’t see nothing but bare dirt.

    ( http://images.travelpod.com/users/mrweinstein/1.1247319379.the-desert-of-washington-statex.jpg )

    But it strikes me that if people were harvesting that to run there cars, we’d easily run out of available dry tumbleweed and sage. I don’t know how well this would work in the wood powered cars anyway.

  14. David–
    Question: am I doing this wrong:

    1) The document says we need 0.5 hectares of natural high forest each person if they use charcoal for fuel and heat.
    2) there are approximately 6,775,235,700 (i.e. 6.8 * 10^9) people on earth. (From google.)
    3) A hectare is 100 m x 100 m or 0.1 km x 0.1 km. So there are 100 hectars in a km^2.

    So, we would need: 6.8*10^9 * 0.5 / 100 km^2 = 34 million square kilometers of natural forest.

    The entire surface area of the earth is 510,072,000 km^2, or 510 km^2 or which 148.9 millions square km is land. (This land includes places like Greeland, tops of mountains and the antarctic where it is not possible to grow trees).

    So, 22% of all land would need to be devoted to growing trees for heating and cooking? If true, wow!

  15. Sea Water! The Hope of the Future! Coal is so yesterday. I don’t know how we’re going to do it but I have faith that Penn State or UEA will come up with something sooner or later. Of course Michael J Fox had something a few years ago that generated 1.21 Gigawatts out of banana peels, soda cans, apple cores, and tissue paper. Whoever has the patent for that thing, I think it was Delorien, is sitting on a gold mine. Ahhhh… WWII the Age of Invention… well it shouldn’t be too long before #III comes our way.

  16. lucia
    Agreed – Biomass has potential but takes a large portion of land area. The major challenge is low conversion efficiency of a few percent. The Renewables Intensive Global Energy Scenario (RIGES) considers 430 million ha for biomass or 10% of cropland plus pastures.
    CO2 Mitigation Potential of Biomass Energy Plantations in Developing Regions T.B. Johansson April 1995, PU/CEES Working Paper 138.

    Solar thermochemical conversion has an order of magnitude higher efficiency and can synthesize fuels in the deserts.
    Solar thermochemical H2 has been estimated at up to 75% theoretical efficiency with practical efficiency potential of 40% of incident solar. See The Role of High Temperature Solar in Low Carbon Hydrogen, Alan W. Weimer, 2011 Sustainable Mobility Seminar

    So biomass is better than nothing. Solar thermochemical holds major promise to cost effectively replace fossil fuels.

  17. David L – there is concern that taking land use changes into account makes some biomass net GHG contributors. IMO Complex area that is still not fully quantified/understood – my understanding of the current state of play is that much of the evaluation work is based on model results and these may not be supported by empirical evidence. EU position is in evolution.

    GBEP have recently produced a list of “sustainability criteria”:

    http://www.globalbioenergy.org/programmeofwork/sustainability/gbep-24-sustainability-indicators/en/

    Wikipedia has some info. on “net” GHG impacts here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_land_use_change_impacts_of_biofuels

    EU current situation links:

    http://www.transportenvironment.org/News/2011/7/Leaked-Iluc-studies-make-it-hard-for-EU-not-to-act/

    http://biomasshub.com/biodiesel-spared-temporarily-under-eu-iluc-decision/

    New US data based study announced (paywall article I’m afraid):

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953411002418

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