One of the constants in human history is that people tend to forget things. Or perhaps more accurately in this age of elite controlled media, certain things that might have a tendency to disrupt the power structure are just never reported on that well. They might get mentioned once or twice and then quietly shelved. This can potentially have disasterous impacts for the people who have been denied access to the information in question. In order to help prevent that I think it is necessary to discuss at least one item of "old" technology that has the potential to help anybody who wants to set up their house or community with power and fuel for their vechicles such that they are "off the grid" and independent of controlled sources for those commodities. I beg the indulgence of those who may already be familiar with what I am about to go into on the grounds that while this information may be old, it is definitely not "common" and there may be large numbers of people who are interested in it.

   The technology in question is called "gassification". Essentially the process consists of burning wood and other suitably combustible materials in a partial vacuum. Because the materials are burned in a vacuum, the combustion that takes place is not complete and some of the gasses that are given off, such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen and small amounts of methane are combustible in and of themselves. These gasses can then be drawn off and used to run a standard internal combustion engine. The engineer who described the process to me originally indicated that the engine would not run as efficiently on the combustion gasses as it would on its normal fuel, but that one could still expect to get at least 50% of the normal operating power out of it. The process cannot be patented as it was originally developed in the late 1800's.

   At any rate, I thought that was good general purpose information to know and file for future reference. However, the details provided by my friend were somewhat sketchy and might not be that helpful to those who wanted to try to build one of these devices from scratch. I recently found out, though, that most of the relevant details that one might want to know about this process have already been published in a magazine where they might be reasonably easily found by the average person. Now granted, this magazine published the information roughly 16 years ago. However, it is the most recent explanation I have seen of this process and provides all the details one would need to set one of the systems up.

   The magazine in question is "The Mother Earth News", the issue in which the article appears is number 69 for the period May/June 1981. The article is titled "Mother's Woodburning Truck" and is carried on pages 126 - 129. Specific details are provided for the system that the author set up to run his pickup truck using the process. He states that his material cost for what he did (back in 1981 and providing his own skilled labor to construct the system) was $125. As a result of the author's use of this system he was able to run his truck for 1,500 miles without paying anything for fuel. The power developed was sufficent to run the truck such that it could keep up with traffic and maintain speeds above the highway speed limit. As should be obvious, anything that could successfully run a pickup truck should also do a decent job of running an electric generator as well.

    Now obviously another way to try to accomplish this goal is to concentrate on using alcohol as a fuel source. However, that has the drawback of potentially getting one butting heads with the idiots in the BATF over just what type of alcohol one is producing, what they are using it for, and what licenses they may or may not have. To the best of my knowledge, there are no such problems involved with using the gassification technology. However, care does have to be exercised in building and maintaining gassification units, as the combustion gases are toxic, flammable, and potentially explosive. Thus, all the tanks, pipes, hatches, valves and welds in the system have to be gas tight and maintained that way.