Gasification Plants
 

I was wondering if anyone here had any experiences/thoughts about “gasification”.

What’s gasification?
Basically, if you take a carbon based material, heat it high enough, it will release a gas that may be burned as a fuel in an engine or on a regular burner. The down side is that the process also releases enough carbon monoxide to ruin your whole day if not vented properly. Also remember we’re dealing with an end product that is VERY combustible…..but that’s a good thing.

Background:
I’ve only recently begun my search for energy backup systems. The thing that really turned me on the most was an old engine I came across called the Lister Engine. Because of its KISS construction, what it can burn, and operating speed, the thing could outlive anyone reading this post. That’s probably why the epa wants to kill them so much.

My problem with it is that I live in the northeast where it can get cold in the winter…….and hand cracking something filled with oil…..running on diesel…….at 10 below…..is something I can’t do. Even if I wanted a fourth back operation (which I don’t)…….I’m not sure it’s physically possible to do even for superman…..and I don’t think he’s had any back operations. The other part of it is that you need an oil based fuel (like diesel) to run it…..along with batteries and all the other goodies to power your house for modern living. You could use a starter?? Maybe??......but what if that bateries are dead…….

So I was thinking….. wouldn’t it be cool (pun intended) if you could burn anything around you…..such as wood……… furniture……..leaves……..or people you don’t like…….and some how turn an engine that would produce electricity……without going through a lot of intermediate inefficient, expensive, loud steps first. And because of all of the upcoming eco regulations they are about to strangle us with……make it eco friendly.

Enter gasification.
With gasification….if I understand it right……you could burn a fuel (a relatively small amount of it) to produce the heat required to release the gas from the rest of the fuel in the chamber (there are many types of fuel that could be used…..theoretically). The gass output could be regulated by the amount of air alowed into the process.

The burn process would create heat and gasses. edit....The gasses produced are 20% hydrogen, 20% carbon monoxide, 50-60% nitrogen. The CO and H are combustible, with the N2 diluting it. After combustion (in the engine) it all turns into C02 (carbon dioxide) and H2O(water).....end edit. The produced gas could directly run a gas or deseil (vapor) engine…..which could produce electricity that would run your lights, refrigerator…etc. The gas could also be used for cooking purposes. The beauty of this is the type of fuel needed (just about anything)….and the theoretical ease of getting the process started. (that’s the biggie for me.) I can hand crack a fan for a few minutes…..but not a deisel engine at 10 below.


This technology has been around for a long time, but for some mysterious reason…..outfits like standard oil aren’t interested in its development.

My question is, dose anyone know of a manufacturer that’s come up with a residential unit that has all the necessary safe guards built in where you won’t suffocate yourself and all your friends, or blow up your neighborhood? Maybe something that could be set up in a shed outdoors?......that doesn’t cost a million dollars?

I understand that there are huge industrial type units……any small ones?

Here’s an example of a small unit…..but it looks like it needs 120VAC to get going……
I’m tempted to get one and do my own modifications to it, but I was wondering how many of these “wheels” have already been invented?
http://utterpower.com/gasification_plant.htm


Thanks for any feedback.

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Re: Gasification Plants
 

Gasification requires a hydrocarbon, not just a carbon material. It is already widely done with coal, and is not something that would make sense on the homebrew level. Look into PV solar or a wind turbine.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

From wikipedia:
Gasification is a process that converts carbonaceous materials, such as coal, petroleum, or biomass, into carbon monoxide and hydrogen by reacting the raw material at high temperatures with a controlled amount of oxygen.

(A biomass material is basically anything alive or dead.) Cow sit works too.

I have explored PV, wind and geothermal. I think I can get a better return on my money than what these systems offer. PV needs a lot of�..well everything.

Wind (I just happen to live in one of the windiest places in America (cape cod)��..but when you have 50 foot pine and oak trees surrounding you�..with a 30 foot structure limit��for a very expensive system��.where the wind below 30 feet changes direction about once every 5 seconds��.and neighbors who like the scenery the way it is����..not a good way to go.

I love the idea of geo-thermal, but you still have to have the �other� system to circulate the water and add the needed extra energy. 50 degrees 5 feet down while it�s 10 below outside sounds great, but I hate cold showers, and it still dosen�t light the lights or drive machinery.

As far as gasification not beeing for home use��says who?

The link provided in the lead post shows a unit that could fit in a basement or shed. If I read it right, it will deliver 7 HP continuous. That could be used in a lot of useful ways�..and the sun doesn�t even have to shine.

My inquiry was more geared towards��can we do better than that?

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Re: Gasification Plants
 

Green wood could be burned in a fluidized bed gasifier the same way China uses them to burn low grade coal. Automobile engines were run in WW2 from gasified wood. Mother Earth News even had simple plans for converting a pickup truck. The trouble with using a common car engine is that the gas flow isn't just H2 and CO, it also contains corrosive formic acid that eventually eats valves. Maybe might be possible to bubble the gas flow through a water column to dissolve out the formic acid, then feed it to a car engine. Which would run a generator. A better method would be to burn the gas flow to run an external combustion engine such as a stirling to crank a generator. Higher efficiency engine and not at all fussy about fuel quality.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

You can't get hydrogen from things that don't have hydrogen. So, as I said before, this process requires hydrocarbons.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

Wood is mostly cellulose, which is quite abundant in hydrogen. The formula for cellulose is (C6H10O5)n. H10! Yep, lotsa hydrogen there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose

There are actually three ways to get hydrocarbons from wood:
#1 hydrolysis with dilute acid to form sugars which are then fermented to alcohol.

#2 gasification to H2 and CO which are then processed via Fisher-Tropsch (pressure-heat) to a hydrocarbon mix from which the gasoline (heptane/hexane) fraction is distilled off. For many years both Nazi Germany and South Africa mixed steam with gasified coal to get their gasoline by this very process.

#3 vacuum pyrolysis: chip the wood and heat it in a vaccum to make a thick flammable oil. There are companies springing up in both Canada and the USA doing it this way. See http://web.utk.edu/~mtaylo29/pages/bio-oil.html

So getting hydrocarbons from wood is really old news. Where do you think the obsolete name for methanol - "wood alcohol" - came from?

Re: Gasification Plants
 

Like this?

http://www.lindsaybks.com/bks4/mathot/index.html

http://www.lindsaybks.com/bks7/bchar/index.html

This site is the BEST source of information for making stuff you can't even buy anymore. I own both gasification books, and many others they sell. Their best series is on building a machine shop from scrap aluminum--making the sand molds, building the foundry, etc, to build the lathe, from which you can build everything else.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

COOL VIDEO OF WOOD GASIFYING, MUST HAVE SOME HYDROGEN

http://www.newhorizoncorp.com/video/eko_burn.wmv


Wood Gasification furnace/boiler. Burns at 2000 degrees in the secondary chamber.

http://www.newhorizoncorp.com/

Click here for details of the furnaces
http://www.newhorizoncorp.com/offer.php?id=4

85% efficient using seasoned hardwood.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

Thanks for the replies.
I haven�t had a chance to review all the links supplied�..yet�..but did want to share a link I found along the way��.from markt first post�..I managed to find more roads I never knew existed��thanks for that.

Anyway, along my trip I came across this web site that I thought I�d share.
As you may see there is a book store that covers this stuff. How well?.....don�t know.

I just bought a bunch of the books they offer, and hope to get through them in a hundred years or so�..

http://www.woodgas.com/

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Re: Gasification Plants
 

Update:
I got my pile of books today. I reeeeeally hate being a slow reader��..
(I got them from the link previously posted.)

They look great. Lot�s of good stuff.

BTW, if any of you are interested in this sort of thing, FEMA wrote a report on how to build one��.I�m not kidding��.FEMA. The last edition came out in 1989. Here�s a link to a down load if interested. Parts list included, with illustrations.

http://www.colostate.edu/programs/co...-gasifiers.htm

It�s titled:
Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum emergency

Now keep in mind��this thing really works. This is not theory.
It turns out that all the major auto manufacturers sold these things back in the �40s.
There were countries that ran 95 percent of their farming equipment on these things��..because all the petrol went to the war effort.

Here�s a picture of a gasifier attached to a tractor plowing a field.

Attachment 33846

Try getting a part number from GM on one of those......:no_ma:

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Re: Gasification Plants
 

You might look into the savonious turbine for wind power to augment your lister. The savonious works well nearly ground level and could care less which direction the wind is coming from or how fast it is changing direction. Cheap and easy to build, too. If you put some effort into it you can make it look more like a moving sculpture than a generator.

The lister is a good off the shelf engine to have. My main interest is in external combustion because internal combustion engines are obviously more sensitive to dirty fuel whereas external combustion engines are unaffected. Regardless the lister has what it takes to be a reliable source of independent energy come what may.

I can garauntee you that it's easy to extract a combustible gas from wood because that's how my charcoal retorts work. It takes an ammount of wood about 1/3 the size of the pile in the retort to get it to the point where the woodgas is sustaining the fire. If you built a big parabolic trench at least ten feet long with a reflective surface and put a sealable steel tube for holding a charge of biomass that had a vent for the gas you wouldn't have to burn any fuel. The side benefit of this is that the charcoal you end up with is good for your garden and there's a number of useful substances that can be made from ash.

Re: Gasification Plants
 

The production of �producer gas� using wood in a gasification plant is extraordinary technology. Simple idea�..heat wood, and produce combustible gasses.


In very general terms, 20 lbs of wood (20% moisture) equals about 1 gallon of gasoline for energy content. I�m of the opinion that mother nature keeps producing both��..but for many people, getting wood is easier than getting oil��and refining it.

It�s interesting that when Germany commandeered all of Denmark�s oil in 1940, the Danish converted 95% of their farming and transportation vehicles to wood gasification within 6 months. (Now, I understand the supply of renewable wood is a factor,��the city of new york would go through central park in short order I�m sure��.., but there were a lot of farmers that had a lot of trees and could have greatly benefited by this technology. Wood gasification had already been around for more than a hundred years by the 1930�s.)


A few interesting statistics about the use of producer gas used in gasoline type engines. If we look at the number of vehicles using this technology in 1942 �� Germany had 350,000 of these converted vehicles. France had 110,000��Japan had 100,000�..even Sweden had 74,000. The US?....... supposedly had 6 vehicles��.Canada let only 1 sneak in, and I can�t find any records for Mexico. During wwii, there were over a million of these units used in europe.

Also, the Detroit car manufacturers were a source for these gasification machines��..but Americans weren�t allowed to purchase them�..most went to China. It seems the technology readily available to the Danish, wasn�t encouraged very much in the US in 1942. Wasn�t it amazing how poor the US was in the 1930s��.and how wealthy we were in 1942?

Thank you federal reserve.


@Rev127, I appreciate the tips on that form of wind conversion. But I don�t think I can make a revolving light house look as good as it probably needs to. In a lot of cases, I�m sure that type of technology makes a lot of sense , but I'm kinda buried in the woods, and the cost benefit thing doesn�t work out. BTW (I just heard that the regional high school in the town of Eastham is considering putting wind turbines up to power the school�..they have a lot of land there, and I�m sure wouldn�t be burdened by height restrictions�..but then again, the bird people will object.)

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