Intersting. I just came across this website the other day and wondered in anyone had actually done it. Makes me wish I had an old pickup to play with.

http://www.gengas.nu/byggbes/index.shtml

"And your steps will lead the way to a greener, energy-independent, wood-powered future."

Greener? Wait a minute, is Treehugger owned by a timber company? Please don't tell me that they want this technology to take off. I would have thought that promoting companies that help others do this would have been opposite of Treehugger's direction.

Wood chip scraps only last so long. Any mid to large scale adoption of this would need trees cut down for fuel, kind of the opposite direction from where we should be going. Plus, there are better things to do with scrap wood than burn it in our cars.

Have I misunderstood something here?

WOW! This makes me want to run out and hug a tree with a chainsaw!

This may be saving gas money, but what kind of impact does it have on the environment? Not only does this product use tree wood, it must release some kind of exhaust into the air. I'd like to know how the impact of the wood-gas engine has in comparison to petroleum engines.

I remember, as a small boy during World War II in England, our local city buses were powered by something similar, which looked like a large garbage can on wheels, towed behind the bus. I believe it heated charcoal, petrol being unobtainable, to produce carbon monoxide (at age 5 my chemistry was a bit shaky). I guess it worked, because I don't remember any stalled buses.

@CNCMike
As far as I know we can grow trees but we can't grow oil wells

Sorry CNCMike, I was answering to Stephen.
It's weird how comment author's names are followed by ":" but are after the comment.

Yeah, unless I owned enough property to sustainably harvest fuel wood from fallen logs (without cutting down any trees) I wouldn't call this green, and I certainly wouldn't do it in my own life.
It is a good way to save money, and it may be able to be considered green if he uses some of the money he saves to plant more trees than he consumes as fuel. Otherwise, I call greenwashing.

This is just another biofuel, and as we are beginning to see, biofuels are not really sustainable when they begin to be adopted on a large scale. Corn ethanol and palm oil biodiesel are already proving to be not-so-harmless, and the jury is still out on sugarcane, switchgrass, and jatropha.

Private motorized transportation is selfish and bad for the environment, in one way or another. Even electric cars help promulgate sprawl. I hope Mr. Beam can apply his considerable ingenuity and inventiveness in providing solutions for public transportation, rather than prolonging the era of the single-occupant vehicle.

I'd say it's green so long as he just uses wood that's otherwise destined to being waste. Leftovers from sawmills and factories would be useful. Also, I like that the trees aren't grown like corn, with a bunch of GM, pesticides, and fertilizers. It's not something for everyone, but if this were something that could be used in say, a sawmill's delivery truck, that'd be great. I highly doubt this is meant to be something in everyone's car. It's like running cars off of waste vegetable oil.

I'm guessing this idea would work well for anything with a lot of cellulose, say corn husks or grass if they were dry enough?

Any biomass will work--wood chips, coffee grounds, walnut shells, old banana trees. Think beyond just the word "tree" to what the implication is of renewable fuel that sucks carbon out of the air, folks...

while this is interesting - a better source of fuel would be the carbon based garbage we throw out every day and the sewage we flush away every day - "Anything Into Oil" look it up on Wikipedia or just Google it - I dont work for them, but I should!

The solution to energy problems and climate change will be in many various alternative fuels, each with a smaller piece of the pie than petroleum has had for decades. Wood hs been an important fuel for humanity for millenia.

Before you can replace petroleum with biomass as a transport fuel you need to extract the inert nitrogen to up the power of the fuel.

Biomass is ideally suited for stationary power generation to get off the grid or feed power to it. That has been the focus of my work. I build gasifiers and I have set up an online community for those interested in learning more. Check it out at www.victorygasworks.com.

Have you ever heard of HHO fuel that has got to be the best way to save on gas prices.?
Imagine the savings. It will cost you about $160, or two tanks of gas to install an HHO
conversion kit

Hydrogen Car Kit - Save Money and Improve MPG Massively
Hydrogen car kit empowers your car to run on water and avoid oil as fuel. A vehicle however
will not be able to run on water alone. There needs to be a mixture of gasoline and water to
enable it to run smoothly.

Even the Water Fuel Conversion Kits - How Using Water As Fuel Helps Cut Your Gas Consumption
Recently,there is increased awareness among many drivers of a technology that uses plain
water tosupplement the cars' gasoline consumption. Called a water fuel conversion kit, it is
a simpleadd-on to your current car engine that uses your car battery to carry out an
electrolysis on water to produce Hydroxy gas (HHO). This Hydroxy gas is used to supplement
the burning ofgasoline in the car's engine.

Hydrogen generator kit for car can be better than gasoline or oil additives to raise gas
mileage. When you make or do it on your own, you can save money on gas but will save lots
of dollars on the kit and reproduce the system for other automobiles on your own.

saving money should be what everyonr thinks off and I have done this by using all ideas from

my sites ==> http://carwaterguide.blogspot.com

I purchased the available eBooks that teach you how to run your car on water and installed
one on my "chevy 350 small block," it's pretty easy.