Homemade Motor Fuel... From Firewood

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As we're sure everyone realizes, MOTHER doesn't claim to have a corner on innovation. So, when given an opportunity to show off someone else's ingenuity, we usually take it and hope that—by doing so—we provide our readers with new concepts which they can put to use in developing their own projects.

Recently, Morton Fry (of the Miles W. Fry & Son nursery) contacted our North Carolina home office and explained that he and a group of associates were working on a wood-powered energy source in which he thought we might be interested. (Regular readers may remember the Fry nursery from the "Hybrid Poplars" article in MOTHER NO. 64... see page 148 for information on ordering back issues.) And, since our researchers had been experimenting with wood gasification units, too, we took Mort up on his offer and paid a visit to the Fry family headquarters in Pennsylvania's rural Lancaster County.

Mr. Fry and about a dozen other concerned people have pooled their resources and talent to form the Wood Power Energy Corporation, a group that's dedicated to making the ligneous combustible a primary source of fuel in this nation by the turn of the century. Rather than merely promote the use of wood in its natural form, "WoodPEC" hopes to be instrumental in the development of some new and more efficient cellulose-based energy systems.

Working under a DOE/General Electric grant, one of the association's members—University of Pennsylvania biochemist Dr. E. Kendall Pye—has already been successful in converting tree-derived polysaccharide material into fermentable glucose, used for making ethanol. And the group eventually plans to get involved not only in the improvement of wood-fired steam generators and the turbines which operate from them, but also in the conversion of "timber" carbons into conventional liquid fuels, using a heat-and-catalyst process.

But for the present the big news at the Frys' Ephrata, Pennsylvania tree farm is the woodburning pickup truck that the WoodPEC folks have developed. The gasification concept used in the vehicle is, for the most part, the same as that utilized in any of the producer-gas generators pressed into service during the fuel-lean years of World War II. The Keystone Staters have, however, apparently improved on the design of the gas-producing unit itself, thus rendering it [1] more efficient than the wood-vapor generators utilized 40 years ago, and [2] more convenient, since it doesn't have to be maintained as diligently as did the original units.