Called the “El Kamina,” it is a wood-powered 1987 Chevrolet El Camino, the last year Chevy made the sedan/pickups. It’s the brainchild of Finnish politician Juha Sipila. Kamiina in Finnish means “stove.” Get it?
Power comes from a wood gas generator. While it sounds high-tech, these were actually used in Great Britain during WWII. Today’s wood gas generators, such as the one in Silila’s El Camino, can utilize 75% of wood’s energy when burned. They’re one of the most environmental energy technologies using renewable energy methods.
He throws a heap of wood pellets into the tank and achieves around 125 miles of range. A full tank of pellets weighs about 175 lbs. But with the generous bed incorporated into all El Caminos, he can actually carry enough wood pellets for 800 miles of range. And the small block Chevy engine it still retains can be used with a combination of wood gas and gasoline.
We should point out that this is a clean alternative to gasoline combustion engines. It’s not like that burning wood in your fireplace. The burning of wood burned this way, called “gasification,” is one of the cleanest forms of combustion. Gasification turns the wood into a gaseous fuel source. A gasifier like that in the El Kamina is 90% cleaner than burning wood in a stove.
Inside the gasifier, all of the wood, and almost all of the resultant smoke and gasses are recirculated for additional power. So the combustion aftermath burns up rather than expelled into the atmosphere. And there are other advantages.
First, wood is a renewable resource. And because wood is almost everywhere, it comes in quite handy when there is a fuel shortage. And for some living in open areas, it is also easy to get, at no cost other than cutting the trees down and making the wood pellets.
Because several byproducts of burning the gas could end up in the atmosphere, filters help to clean things up. Dust, biomass ash, fly ash, and gas emissions are just some of the things that need to be contained.
The top speed for the wood-powered El Kamina is around 87 miles ( Edit, an hour I am assuming), so it’s no race car. But most daily drivers aren’t. According to diseno-art, there are a few downside
One is that it takes 20 minutes to get everything hot enough to create the gas. That’s similar to steam-powered cars. They take time to heat the water into steam. Another problem is they tend to need regular maintenance in the form of cleaning them. It’s a dirty job.
Though the boilers inside the wood gas generators have self-cleaning features, heat exchangers must be cleaned on a regular basis. If not, the efficiency of the generator goes down quickly. There are also ash bins to empty regularly.
So there you go. What looked like a goof, that of burning wood to run a car turns out to be very environmental-friendly.
I’m impressed.
It’s kind of huge but it works. I suppose if you needed to actually haul something, you just drag a trailer behind it.
Along with a bunch of kindling.
28 thoughts on “An 87 El Camino With A Wild Twist”
Yeah, I caught a glimpse at his screen showing speed. That’s km/hour, not miles. Max speed of 55mph. Not surprising if you’ve messed around with wood gasifiers. The one I looked at could make maybe a quarter of the power that running gasoline through the same engine would provide. Because of that, you need to keep the revs up.
I think if I had to run that I’d stay home and use the wood to run a still.—ken
Gotta figure that on woodgas it will be maybe half the power of the same engine on gasoline. At best. So you likely can’t pull a trailer.
Also, the woodgas is corrosive, so yer gonna have intake issues down the road. Probably doesn’t meet any sort of emissions standards either.
Yer gonna spend about 2 hours a month cleaning the output pipes from the gasifier and the intakes for the engine. Soot and creosote.
Woodgas is a great idea *if you have no other option*. Other than that it isn’t all that great.
I’ve tried it. Twice.
Still on wheels…….I need to think about this.
I think I just have to get me one o’ them smooth-running jackass.
Sipila or Silila? You’ve got two different spellings of the bloke’s name. With the abundant forests of Finland, he’ll never run out of fuel.
It’s a direct copy/paste of the original article. Take it up with the authors.
Well, if gas and diesel are $50/gal with a 10 gal per week limit, and electric rides are at $200k…..wood gas might start to look appealing.
Exactly. It’s pretty much a last resort and there probably wouldn’t be anywhere to go anyway. At that point society would have already collapsed.
Excellent point.
If you have a wood burning stove you’ve likely encountered wood gas. If the door on the wood burner is opened just after the damper closes you may have a large flash of burning gas coming out right at you.
And so? Wood gassification is really the last straw, or the sure sign of a failed nation. Big in Nazi Germany and post Nazi Germany for a while.
All so that you can cut down carbon sequestration devices and burn them, releasing said carbon. Oh, that makes so much fucking sense.
Places like Germany have already seen deforestation on a scale not seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution over ‘biomass’ fuels.
And, as said, half at best the energy contained even in shitty E85 fuel. All to replace the second most common liquid on/in the Earth.
Here’s a clue. The City of Gainesville, FL had THE HIGHEST BOND RATED public owned utility in the nation. Then some dumbass talked the city commission (which has power over the utility portion) into sponsoring a biomass plant, basically a regular coal/gas plant but made to burn trees and other plant waste.
And it costs more to just start the plant running than it can ever recover in revenue.
Then the company that built it sold the plant that is too expensive to run to the City of Gainesville and now the State of Florida is looking into taking over he utility company because the utility bonds are now junk bonds.
Biomass is ‘cute’ but is a nightmare. Low power, bad for metal (as you’re tossing a helluvalotta water vapor into an engine that has steel and iron parts in it) and bad for the environment.
It’s only usable when one can’t get liquid fuels or even gaseous petroleum fuels. Coal gassification is better for the engine and the environment. Burning waste motor oil is better for the environment.
Fuck, so much fucking fail. There’s a big reason that steam power has disappeared for use in transportation.
This is a typical Green-scam mismatch of technology and location. The reason it won’t be worth the money in Florida IS BECAUSE IT IS FLORIDA.
Gasifying wood produces heat, hydrogen/carbon monoxide to burn, ash and tar and other impurities. Heat is the biggest product, which turned into steam can run steam turbines, the gas can be used for anything methane can with a tweak, like changing natgas orifices for LP orifices on a kitchen stove.
The “waste heat” doesn’t have much use in Florida, but in places up north that have an abindance of FUCKING cold weather it can be used to HEAT buildings. Air conditioning, not so much.
There’s also a difference in BTUs, ash content, tar/creosote content and moisture content between Southern Yellow Pine down south and aspen and other hardwoods that grow up north. The waste heat can be used to dry the chips used, and is, but you still have a dirtier product in coniferous wood than deciduous products.
To me, just as I wouldn’t try generating tidal power in Lake Superior with it’s 6-inch tide (except during a seiche, those things are scary), I wouldn’t put a biomass in a fucking tropical area with shitty wood and no good use for waste heat but running distillation (like preheat for a refinery or ethanol production) unless I could make a bunch of money scamming a gullible bunch of retards.
It’s a local thing, and like putting anything solar in areas of sunshine, windmills of any sort in windy areas, or nuclear plants next to large sources of water, these belong up north where there are areas with an excess of timber, not in the tropics with tree farms made for lumber.
Minnesota is perfect, it gets cold as hell, almost 18 million acres of forested land, and a $400 million OSB plant that would have taken in a lot of the overaged timber that has no place to go got torpedoed in court thanks to a tribe not being given gibs.
We’re headed into a time where there will be massive disruptions in fuel, heat, transportatiin and electricity and you shit on an alternative because it doesn’t work in your area in the current time. You even allude to the reason this exists in your penultimate paragraph as to when it will be used, yet ignore that can be as early as this coming summer.
Wind blows, sun shines, water flows downhill, wood burns, earth cools. There are many combinations of these natural actions that can be leveraged into modern uses, and we will get a chance to innovate better ways to produce local energy after this shit collapses. Those populations that can’t or won’t change will be eliminated in the upcoming Tournament of Darwinism.
FEMA put out a pamphlet (including a parts list) on how to convert a tractor to wood gas in the late 1980s as a help to come back from a nuclear war. I’m lazy, but you can find it on the internet.
Download it there, a lot of people will talk big about horsepower and speed loss, potential engine damage, emissions and being a complicated, time-consuming endeavor.
Those people either have a refinery in their back yard (that the government doesn’t know about because they’ll just kill you for the precious juice) or have a large supply of boot soles and cobbling experience.
Kind of like everyone that uses tobacco and dowsn’t grow it or live near growing areas, you’ll still have bad cravings after 6 months, I quit 30 years of chewing cold turkey on Labor Day and just got through the inner-lip licking.
11 years here. Still miss it from time to time, but no cravings.
“at no cost other than cutting the trees down and making the wood pellets”
I know a little something about the wood pelleting industry and that “no cost” unicorn fart fairy tale sounds like more Greta green energy horse poo. The process ain’t cheap. Pellet mills and the related equipment to grind and then steam condition the wood so it can be pelleted and then cooled are expensive and horsepower intensive. The machinery involved is the same as used to pellet animal feed, but production in tons per hour is much lower even though the final products have similar bulk density per cubic foot of pellets. Wood pellets are just flat-out harder to force thru the pellet die and capacity goes down while power stays the same, increases.
There is a huge build up in the wood pelleting industry in the southeast United States going on right now to pellet soft woods and ship to Europe in bulk for electric power co-generation. The Europeans are also under gubmint mandate to be “green” and renewable and there simply aren’t enough trees in Europe to supply the demand. I suppose there might be sufficient trees in Siberia to make up the difference, but due to certain inconveniences those are not available.
This is different from other wood pelleting done in the USA for smokers and home furnaces, which uses the same manufacturing process but uses hard woods which are mostly bagged instead of bulk shipped.
Also note that the article indicated pellets but the wood being loaded into the apparatus is in the form of chunks. So how much of the article is real and how much is BS may be open to question.
Wood pellets are an absolute energy sink and for making and transporting BTUs out of sawdust (waste material) to places that don’t have wood to burn. Places without the BTUs to produce energy will not be manufacturing much of anything, hence Germany and BASF shuttering 75 year-old plants.
Canada and northern US, wood is good. You don’t burn wood in Nebraska, but there sure are a lot of corn stalks and cobs down there. Kind of like a gator farm in Minnesota, it doesn’t make sense to pelletize wood and ship it out unless you’re strip-mining one area and overcharging the recipients, creating a massive profit.
100% correct, but like I said, it’s a government mandate, so…….
We are required to burn ethanol at gunpoint on our side of the pond and they are required to burn wood at gunpoint on theirs. Which is worse? I have no idea. They both suck.
Didn’t Darryl Hannah have an El Camino converted to run on french fry oil? Probably a better option. Just have to steam clean her cooties out of it first.
Better build it now and have spare parts in triplicate, think I’ll just find a buckboard and mule.
Yup, couple of horses/mules will get you further when the SHTF.
It’s not like we’re going on a family vacation if the SHTF.
I knew a guy in Vermont that converted a VW rabbit to run on waste grease from the local eateries. He was all gung-ho on it making him a billionaire. I asked him one day what he thought the restaurants would charge him for the grease when they realized he was making money off of their “product” and he just gave me a blank stare.
Scotch broom is everywhere in my neck of the woods…shit tons of it! This can be refined into fuel, but noooo, the greenoids keep bitching how it’s so invasive and do yearly ‘hack downs’ of the stuff to control it, just to have it grow back fivefold the next year. What they do collect gets composted with bio sludge and then dumped in the forest as an nutrient or sold to idiot growers that salt their gardens with it! The shit is marketed as an amendment and regularly gets halted because of heavy metal content.
I’ve done gasifiers and I ran off waste veggie oil for about 8 years.
Waste veggie is a pain in the ass, either using it straight in the summer or making Biodiesel out of (for winter use)….But it IS doable as a direct replacement (less about 25% in mileage) for diesel. You do use up a fair number of filters because it is dirty fuel and carries more dirt than diesel(which had detergents added). But it is a doable thing. Saves money too. I don’t use it today because I can afford diesel.
Wood gasifiers are a whole ‘nother level of pain in the ass, and a whole ‘nother level of dirty. Plus the start up time each morning. I used good hardwoods too, so that excuse is out the window. Add in the loss of power (1/2 to 2/3) using woodgas and it just isn’t worth it. If you think woodgas is a good idea, then you have never tried it. You may have seen videos or read a pamphlet or article in Mother Earth News, but reality is a totally different thing. If you say it is a good idea (unless there are no alternatives) without actually building or buying a woodgas gasifier setup *and using it* then you simply are a keyboard commando sort of guy. Try it, and get back to the rest of us and tell us how great it is.
So it’s almost as fast as it was when that smogmotor was new. Might be just a bit more practical re-inventing the steam truck
This reminds me of the Indian dude that built an electric powered machine that converted plastic to a petroleum cooking fuel, unfortunately it was expensive to build, it took a LOT of electricity to make very few BTU worth of fuel, the device needed almost a complete rebuild every couple of batches and it stunk to high heaven when it was operating.
Yeah, I caught a glimpse at his screen showing speed. That’s km/hour, not miles. Max speed of 55mph. Not surprising if you’ve messed around with wood gasifiers. The one I looked at could make maybe a quarter of the power that running gasoline through the same engine would provide. Because of that, you need to keep the revs up.
I think if I had to run that I’d stay home and use the wood to run a still.—ken
Gotta figure that on woodgas it will be maybe half the power of the same engine on gasoline. At best. So you likely can’t pull a trailer.
Also, the woodgas is corrosive, so yer gonna have intake issues down the road. Probably doesn’t meet any sort of emissions standards either.
Yer gonna spend about 2 hours a month cleaning the output pipes from the gasifier and the intakes for the engine. Soot and creosote.
Woodgas is a great idea *if you have no other option*. Other than that it isn’t all that great.
I’ve tried it. Twice.
Still on wheels…….I need to think about this.
I think I just have to get me one o’ them smooth-running jackass.
Sipila or Silila? You’ve got two different spellings of the bloke’s name. With the abundant forests of Finland, he’ll never run out of fuel.
It’s a direct copy/paste of the original article. Take it up with the authors.
Well, if gas and diesel are $50/gal with a 10 gal per week limit, and electric rides are at $200k…..wood gas might start to look appealing.
Exactly. It’s pretty much a last resort and there probably wouldn’t be anywhere to go anyway. At that point society would have already collapsed.
Excellent point.
If you have a wood burning stove you’ve likely encountered wood gas. If the door on the wood burner is opened just after the damper closes you may have a large flash of burning gas coming out right at you.
And so? Wood gassification is really the last straw, or the sure sign of a failed nation. Big in Nazi Germany and post Nazi Germany for a while.
All so that you can cut down carbon sequestration devices and burn them, releasing said carbon. Oh, that makes so much fucking sense.
Places like Germany have already seen deforestation on a scale not seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution over ‘biomass’ fuels.
And, as said, half at best the energy contained even in shitty E85 fuel. All to replace the second most common liquid on/in the Earth.
Here’s a clue. The City of Gainesville, FL had THE HIGHEST BOND RATED public owned utility in the nation. Then some dumbass talked the city commission (which has power over the utility portion) into sponsoring a biomass plant, basically a regular coal/gas plant but made to burn trees and other plant waste.
And it costs more to just start the plant running than it can ever recover in revenue.
Then the company that built it sold the plant that is too expensive to run to the City of Gainesville and now the State of Florida is looking into taking over he utility company because the utility bonds are now junk bonds.
Biomass is ‘cute’ but is a nightmare. Low power, bad for metal (as you’re tossing a helluvalotta water vapor into an engine that has steel and iron parts in it) and bad for the environment.
It’s only usable when one can’t get liquid fuels or even gaseous petroleum fuels. Coal gassification is better for the engine and the environment. Burning waste motor oil is better for the environment.
Fuck, so much fucking fail. There’s a big reason that steam power has disappeared for use in transportation.
This is a typical Green-scam mismatch of technology and location. The reason it won’t be worth the money in Florida IS BECAUSE IT IS FLORIDA.
https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/local/hibbing-renewable-energy-center-re-fires-biomass-boiler/article_90bd3600-3acf-11ed-b53b-8ff94348a308.html
Gasifying wood produces heat, hydrogen/carbon monoxide to burn, ash and tar and other impurities. Heat is the biggest product, which turned into steam can run steam turbines, the gas can be used for anything methane can with a tweak, like changing natgas orifices for LP orifices on a kitchen stove.
The “waste heat” doesn’t have much use in Florida, but in places up north that have an abindance of FUCKING cold weather it can be used to HEAT buildings. Air conditioning, not so much.
There’s also a difference in BTUs, ash content, tar/creosote content and moisture content between Southern Yellow Pine down south and aspen and other hardwoods that grow up north. The waste heat can be used to dry the chips used, and is, but you still have a dirtier product in coniferous wood than deciduous products.
To me, just as I wouldn’t try generating tidal power in Lake Superior with it’s 6-inch tide (except during a seiche, those things are scary), I wouldn’t put a biomass in a fucking tropical area with shitty wood and no good use for waste heat but running distillation (like preheat for a refinery or ethanol production) unless I could make a bunch of money scamming a gullible bunch of retards.
It’s a local thing, and like putting anything solar in areas of sunshine, windmills of any sort in windy areas, or nuclear plants next to large sources of water, these belong up north where there are areas with an excess of timber, not in the tropics with tree farms made for lumber.
Minnesota is perfect, it gets cold as hell, almost 18 million acres of forested land, and a $400 million OSB plant that would have taken in a lot of the overaged timber that has no place to go got torpedoed in court thanks to a tribe not being given gibs.
We’re headed into a time where there will be massive disruptions in fuel, heat, transportatiin and electricity and you shit on an alternative because it doesn’t work in your area in the current time. You even allude to the reason this exists in your penultimate paragraph as to when it will be used, yet ignore that can be as early as this coming summer.
Wind blows, sun shines, water flows downhill, wood burns, earth cools. There are many combinations of these natural actions that can be leveraged into modern uses, and we will get a chance to innovate better ways to produce local energy after this shit collapses. Those populations that can’t or won’t change will be eliminated in the upcoming Tournament of Darwinism.
FEMA put out a pamphlet (including a parts list) on how to convert a tractor to wood gas in the late 1980s as a help to come back from a nuclear war. I’m lazy, but you can find it on the internet.
https://www.driveonwood.com/library/fema-gasifier/
Download it there, a lot of people will talk big about horsepower and speed loss, potential engine damage, emissions and being a complicated, time-consuming endeavor.
Those people either have a refinery in their back yard (that the government doesn’t know about because they’ll just kill you for the precious juice) or have a large supply of boot soles and cobbling experience.
Kind of like everyone that uses tobacco and dowsn’t grow it or live near growing areas, you’ll still have bad cravings after 6 months, I quit 30 years of chewing cold turkey on Labor Day and just got through the inner-lip licking.
11 years here. Still miss it from time to time, but no cravings.
“at no cost other than cutting the trees down and making the wood pellets”
I know a little something about the wood pelleting industry and that “no cost” unicorn fart fairy tale sounds like more Greta green energy horse poo. The process ain’t cheap. Pellet mills and the related equipment to grind and then steam condition the wood so it can be pelleted and then cooled are expensive and horsepower intensive. The machinery involved is the same as used to pellet animal feed, but production in tons per hour is much lower even though the final products have similar bulk density per cubic foot of pellets. Wood pellets are just flat-out harder to force thru the pellet die and capacity goes down while power stays the same, increases.
There is a huge build up in the wood pelleting industry in the southeast United States going on right now to pellet soft woods and ship to Europe in bulk for electric power co-generation. The Europeans are also under gubmint mandate to be “green” and renewable and there simply aren’t enough trees in Europe to supply the demand. I suppose there might be sufficient trees in Siberia to make up the difference, but due to certain inconveniences those are not available.
This is different from other wood pelleting done in the USA for smokers and home furnaces, which uses the same manufacturing process but uses hard woods which are mostly bagged instead of bulk shipped.
Also note that the article indicated pellets but the wood being loaded into the apparatus is in the form of chunks. So how much of the article is real and how much is BS may be open to question.
Wood pellets are an absolute energy sink and for making and transporting BTUs out of sawdust (waste material) to places that don’t have wood to burn. Places without the BTUs to produce energy will not be manufacturing much of anything, hence Germany and BASF shuttering 75 year-old plants.
Canada and northern US, wood is good. You don’t burn wood in Nebraska, but there sure are a lot of corn stalks and cobs down there. Kind of like a gator farm in Minnesota, it doesn’t make sense to pelletize wood and ship it out unless you’re strip-mining one area and overcharging the recipients, creating a massive profit.
100% correct, but like I said, it’s a government mandate, so…….
We are required to burn ethanol at gunpoint on our side of the pond and they are required to burn wood at gunpoint on theirs. Which is worse? I have no idea. They both suck.
Didn’t Darryl Hannah have an El Camino converted to run on french fry oil? Probably a better option. Just have to steam clean her cooties out of it first.
Better build it now and have spare parts in triplicate, think I’ll just find a buckboard and mule.
Yup, couple of horses/mules will get you further when the SHTF.
It’s not like we’re going on a family vacation if the SHTF.
I knew a guy in Vermont that converted a VW rabbit to run on waste grease from the local eateries. He was all gung-ho on it making him a billionaire. I asked him one day what he thought the restaurants would charge him for the grease when they realized he was making money off of their “product” and he just gave me a blank stare.
Scotch broom is everywhere in my neck of the woods…shit tons of it! This can be refined into fuel, but noooo, the greenoids keep bitching how it’s so invasive and do yearly ‘hack downs’ of the stuff to control it, just to have it grow back fivefold the next year. What they do collect gets composted with bio sludge and then dumped in the forest as an nutrient or sold to idiot growers that salt their gardens with it! The shit is marketed as an amendment and regularly gets halted because of heavy metal content.
I’ve done gasifiers and I ran off waste veggie oil for about 8 years.
Waste veggie is a pain in the ass, either using it straight in the summer or making Biodiesel out of (for winter use)….But it IS doable as a direct replacement (less about 25% in mileage) for diesel. You do use up a fair number of filters because it is dirty fuel and carries more dirt than diesel(which had detergents added). But it is a doable thing. Saves money too. I don’t use it today because I can afford diesel.
Wood gasifiers are a whole ‘nother level of pain in the ass, and a whole ‘nother level of dirty. Plus the start up time each morning. I used good hardwoods too, so that excuse is out the window. Add in the loss of power (1/2 to 2/3) using woodgas and it just isn’t worth it. If you think woodgas is a good idea, then you have never tried it. You may have seen videos or read a pamphlet or article in Mother Earth News, but reality is a totally different thing. If you say it is a good idea (unless there are no alternatives) without actually building or buying a woodgas gasifier setup *and using it* then you simply are a keyboard commando sort of guy. Try it, and get back to the rest of us and tell us how great it is.
So it’s almost as fast as it was when that smogmotor was new. Might be just a bit more practical re-inventing the steam truck
This reminds me of the Indian dude that built an electric powered machine that converted plastic to a petroleum cooking fuel, unfortunately it was expensive to build, it took a LOT of electricity to make very few BTU worth of fuel, the device needed almost a complete rebuild every couple of batches and it stunk to high heaven when it was operating.
Other than that, it was great.
Another link…..
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6054362