Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
There is a lot of discussion about diesel and biodiesel, and alcohol.
But we have seen shortages of the liquid fuels before, and it is possible to run small engines on wood. They would have to convert but it is doable. Assuming there are trees or other carbon to burn.
This has been done before when petroleum was in short supply, such as in germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
You can actually use existing engines, and the gassifier is not terribly complicated. I don't know this guy or his videos, https://youtu.be/522BaxM0Jnk but it is similar to others I have seen using a bicycle as the vehicle and a standard engine as the power, wood as the power source.
There are better and worse designs, and certainly not press the button and drive, but its an option.
These were wood powered:
EDIT: I almost forgot, you can make a gas generator station and fill a bag with it to use for the engine.
Like these vehicles here:
Nice! And it's using a largely unprocessed resource, whereas food oils are processed and can be put to other uses (like food). You can't eat wood.
Some caveats:
Works best with simple engines. Newer cars with their computers and fuel injection not so great.
Much less power and efficiency, but hey its an engine and at one time there were thousands of busses, cars, tractors, and even some trains that used this.
Also, probably best to convert the wood to charcoal. Not too hard to do at scale really. I think that would be easier to manage in the combuster and last longer.