Making fuel from wood.

[wardd]

Originally Posted by bulk-head

Even more interesting would be to turn fuel into wood. Ive presently got 40 gallons of waste engine oil...does anyone know how to process this waste oil into vertical grain teak ? I need about 25 board feet .

turn the oil into fertilizer, fertilize teak saplings

[Submarine Tom]

Originally Posted by bulk-head

Dont be silly...no one is advocating solar homes, only Solar water heaters. They are cheap and effective at conserving huge amounts of energy.
Coal will always be used. Cleaner coal burning techniques coupled with reduced demand is the way forward..
Industrial production in the US lives on cheap energy....the industrial base has collapsed not due to energy but to huge overhead connected to healthcare, retirement and legacy cost and decades of poor , overpaid, uninspiring management who fed the world products they did not want to buy..

Passive solar heating is the way of the future. However, it may be some time before we catch on to this simple solution.

-Tom

[StianM]

I own quite a lot of forest so I'm really into trying to make diesel from wood.
If I could gasify wood and use 90% of the gas to run a generator and electricity from the generator to convert the remaining 10% into diesel it would be worth the effort.

[hoytedow]

http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf1991/zerbe91a.pdf

[FAST FRED]

Since 2003 large diesel trucks are exhausting far better air than enters the inlet , in almost every big city.

Those 75MPG diesel cars would end up far cleaner than the dumb coal cars.

And after 5 years diesel is just broken in , not ready for a $10,000 battery set.

FF

[SamSam]

I'm getting the idea that you have to turn it into a vapor first, and then turn the vapor into a liquid and then probably distill that into gasoline and diesel.

Maybe the Fischer- Tropsch process, described in the bottom site cited here, is what you need. It's patented so the process would be fully described in the patent. If the patent is expired, you are free to use it without paying royalties.

http://www.energyandclimate.org/synthetic-diesel.html

DIMETHYL ETHER (DME)

DME can be made from biomass, natural gas, or coal.
Used in a diesel engine, DME provides substantial reductions in particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer...ropsch_process

Originally Posted by Ike

Actually the Germans use anything they could get their hands on to make fuel. Wood, potatos, coal.

Yeah, an in heaven is funfair...........

[cthippo]

Originally Posted by hoytedow

It is, but you have to find some way to get it through those tiny little fuel ports/injectors.

I was reading recently about the development of the A-12 / SR-71 and learned that originally Kelly Johnson wanted to fuel it with coal slurry because of the high energy density. The idea never went anywhere due to concerns about corrosion and erosion of engine parts.

Originally Posted by CatBuilder

Then... we could also line our roofs with photoelectric solar panels instead of ruining the ocean with wind turbines.

This works rather well, actually, but until the cost comes down some more it's not yet practical.

The big cost centers are the solar cells themselves, but also the inverters. Once those barriers are overcome the system can work very well, especially since excess power can be fed back into the grid. A fair number of people have put this sort of a system into use and it works well. A friend of mine did this and even here in sun starved Washington it works. The initial system cost I believe $27,000 and is expected to pay for itself in 15 years. In the meantime, his annualized power bill is pretty much zero since he feeds the grid in the summer and extracts in the winter. He also has a solar hot water system.

Large scale deployments of such systems could go a long ways towards meeting our electrical energy needs without the use of fossil fuels.

Another application for solar that has started to come on-line are massive solar farms in hot, sunny areas. Again, cost of materials is an issue, but they are apparently profitable enough to keep the bean counters happy.

[hoytedow]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...1143708AAKjYR9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2AJ8aiE4a4&NR=1

Termites fart all the time. Just keep them in your tank and throw in wood. They probably fart more than any other animal, pound for pound.