Gas prices spark interest in alternative energy source for vehicles: wood chips.

It’s very real, and there is nothing new about it. Many people my age and older will remember.

It’s not funny. The other day we had to buy a new washing machine. It cost us just under $500. After we got back to town, I filled up our truck. That cost me another $138. Mind you, with the amount of driving we can afford now, that’ll be good for a couple of years or more, as long as no one figures out how to get a siphon hose into the truck’s gas tank (or perhaps he may even take the whole truck again, as they did last year).

There is a solution to gas shortages and prohibitive gas prices that is about 70 years old that our neighbour (and even owners of buses) used, “der Holzvergaser” (”the wood-gasifier”). That required a steel container about the size and shape of a hot-water tank to be installed in the trunk of the car. It stood upright and projected through the lid of the trunk. It required a hole to be cut through the trunk lid — eh, come on, what’s a hole in the trunk lid when there is nothing that you can get or afford to put into your gas tank?

I don’t know what the gas mileage was per sack of wood chips. The neighbour’s car made a top speed of maybe 40 klicks and every few miles (for him it was about three miles) one had to stop to stoke the gasifier to keep the fire going that produced the smoke that kept the car going. Now and then the “gas” lines and a few traps had to be cleaned out to remove the creosote and tar. It stank like the dickens, but the car would run (as long as one had enough patience for the warm-up period; if I remember right, that was about a half hour or more). I guess a big advantage was that if one ran out of wood chips, it was always possible to top-off the tank as long as there was a fence nearby.

You think that I am joking? Not at all. [1] Check this Mercedes truck, this [2] Adler car, and [3] here is a whole raft of wood-gasifiers installed on various more modern vehicles and a few older stationary engines (click on a given thumbnail image at the latter web page to see a full-blown photo). That was a hobby for the owners until just recently, when it became a necessity.

I never thought that things like that would become real again without having Hitler around to make them necessary. Although Hitler caused a general gas shortage and gas rationing to develop, even he didn’t have the gall to drive gas prices through the roof. For that to happen we needed a few people far more powerful than Hitler was.

So, let’s see. A barrel of syncrude costs about $16.50 to produce, make it about another five dollars to turn that into gasoline and another dollar to pump it into the fuel tank at the service station. Roughly calculated, that leaves $53.42 in “windfall profits” for the oil companies and only $75.92 in profit for the provincial and federal governments per barrel.

Der Holzvergaser gets to look better all the time. A tip: stock up on highway flares. One of them will light the wood gasifier without any effort at all. Don’t try to use matches. Don’t worry about driving slow and holding up traffic. There will be less and less traffic as prices go up.  That is the aim of the game, right?  Got to save that globe, and no price it too high for that, right?