Gasifier Experimenters Kit

Biomass Energy Foundation: Methanol~~~Permit me a little personal history of how I came to beinterested in alternate fuels. In 1972 I was working at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in crystalgrowth. I ate lunch occasionally with a Peter Robeck whogrew up in Germany and knew a great deal about theNazis synthetic fuel program during WWII. He flew aspotter plane at the battle of Stalingrad fueled with whatwe now call "gasohol", a high octane mixture of gasolineand ethanol (the drinking alcohol made by fermentation ofcorn etc) .Oil, diesel and gasoline have become such a major baseof our society that I first heard concerns about "when theoil runs out", in 1959, and we still do. I became interestedin the question of alternate fuels in 1973 when my bossasked me to look into "hydrogen from sunlight" as apossible new energy source. However, hydrogen does notoccur in nature and Mother Nature has had 3 billion yearsof development on renewable fuels throughphotosynthesis. So I began inquiring about alcohols asfuels. Ethanol is easily made from any starchy plant andHenry Ford predicted that some day our case would berunning on fuels growing beside the road.However, methanol is by far the simplest and cheapest($0.15/gal at that time) synthetic fuel to makesynthetically. It is used in preference to gasoline at therace track, and I learned in 1973 that student teams hadconverted cars to methanol and won clean air car races. Itis made in enormous quantities, mostly from natural gas.It is also be made in well known processes from coal,wood, agricultural and forest wastes and municipalhttp://www.woodgas.com/methanol.htm (3 of 5) [10/9/2008 08:23:07]