Wayne Keith, a partner in Renewable Energy Systems LLC (RES), has developed gasification technology that enables regular vehicles which are normally fueled with gasoline, to be powered with a wide range of solid biomass materials, like wood, switchgrass, crop residues and broiler litter.

The biomass powered pickup (the Bio-Truck) will be used to attract media attention, and will be powered on a wide range of solid fuels during the course of the tour. The tour will start in Charleston, SC, on the east coast and take a southern route to San Diego, then north to Los Angeles, and San Francisco, stopping at different renewable energy installations en route to get the media to highlight these projects, companies and technologies. Visit www.au-biotruck.com for more information on the tour.

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The transcript for this video is provided below. If you do not understand the English language, please read the transcript so that you can understand what is being said.

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T-CO Alternative Fuels, LLC

Presents

SCREEN DISPLAY TEXT: Biomass Powered Pick-up Truck (Bio-Truck)

Interview And Demonstration

Conducted During The
2008 Bioenergy Conference
Tifton, GA. USA
August 12-13, 2008

SIGN: Southeast Bioenergy

SUBTITLE: Gasifier mounted on a 1987 dodge dakota pickup with a v6 engine

SUBTITLE: Adding wood biomass to the gasifier

SCREEN DISPLAY TEXT: Biomass Powered Pick-up Truck (Bio-Truck)

Wayne Keith, a partner in Renewable Energy Systems LLC., has developed gasification technology that enables regular vehicles which are normally fueled with gasoline, to be powered with a wide range of solid biomass materials, like wood, switchgrass, crop residues, and broiler litter.

SUBTITLE: Wayne Keith Bio-Truck Owner/Inventor/Designer/Fabricator

WAYNE KEITH: I’m Wayne Keith. We got a gasifier; this vehicle doesn’t run on gasoline, it runs off of biomass. I mainly run it off wood or switchgrass and even my household trash. To load it up I take wood scraps. They go right into the container.  It goes through a gasification process. It goes through a filter here. It comes under these cooler rails, these are not actually the side-boards but it serves as a cooler also. it goes around through those back down underneath the truck to some settlement containers under there back through a filter and then back to the engine as a vapor that runs the motor. It takes about 20 pounds of dry biomass to replace a gallon of gasoline. If I were buying wood it would cost me less than a penny a mile to run this vehicle. But I don’t buy any wood, what I’m using is scraps. I’ve got a decent ride. This is the fuel hopper here. I put the fuel in there, it’s stored there, it drops on down in the bowels of the system there. The wood is gasified, and then it comes back out into this container here, enters in this cooler system, goes around and goes underneath the truck and goes back to the motor.

T-CO CAMERAMAN: I see. So from these cooling pipes it goes down through there, and back in around.

SUBTITLE: Dr. David Bransby Auburn University:

DR. BRANSBY: I think, perhaps what’s interesting, is that the difference between just straight burning open fire.  When you burn something like wood, your going to get, gases come off of them too. But you get water vapor, interestingly enough the hydrogen in the carbon, the hydrogen in the biomass has oxygen added to it so you get water vapor, h2o comes off. The carbon gets oxygen added to it and you get CO2 so those two gases come off and you get ash left on the ground. Now, what the gasifier is doing, it’s restricting the amount of air and therefore oxygen that can get to the fire. There’s essentially a fire in there, but not as much a oxygen getting to it so instead of water vapor coming off you get straight hydrogen. So, hydrogen is one of the gases and instead of carbon dioxide there is not enough oxygen to form the dioxide, only monoxide. So, carbon monoxide and hydrogen is a mixture of gases, that we call syngas, that really runs through this, gets cooled down, and that is what runs the engine.

DR. BRANSBY: It burns almost like natural gas, although it does not have anywhere near the same energy content as natural gas. Anyway, I think Wayne is very humble.  This is by far, I have seen a few gasifiers and I have not seen anything that runs anywhere close to as good as this one.

I was following Wayne down last night.  There were times when he was doing 70 miles per hour. Even on the interstate, 75 miles per hour, he came racing past me.

WAYNE KEITH: Don’t get us thrown in jail, now.

DR. BRANSBY: 75 miles per hour on wood!  You know, and Wayne keeps saying these guys that are driving on gasoline and I am passing them, they would not like that if they knew I was driving on wood. This is a small six-cylinder. He has an eight-cylinder that he gets up over 80 miles per hour with the eight-cylinder, V8.  This is a remarkable achievement for somebody who does not have any formal engineering training. Amazing, amazing engineer.

DR. BRANSBY: What I wanted to tell you a little bit more about is our plans for this tour.  Way back, I believe in the early 80’s — I think in 1981, another person from Alabama, Ben Russell and Jerry Scott, a partner of his, they wanted to initiate an alternative energy business and they wanted to promote it. So they built a similar kind – not as good as this I don’t think, but certainly they built something similar and they drove from coast to coast and got a lot of media attention.

And what we are trying to do is the same thing, with one difference. We are going to stop at different biomass instillation projects across the country and we want to get the media to focus not only on the truck, but also on the different technologies and projects that are going on in this whole field. And our sponsors – what I want to emphasize, I am not just advertising for the sponsors, our sponsors are the industry.  These different companies are forming a critical component, each a critical component of this developing industry. So we are going to be stopping at each of their projects all across the country and hopefully educating the public about what can be done with bioenergy.  There no question in my mind that we can replace imported oil within, probably, ten to twenty years.  Now that may sound like a long time — it flashes by for us older people — and I think that this can be done and certainly I’m going to do all I can to facilitate it.

WAYNE KEITH: Dr. David will you touch on why you claim that this vehicle is more environmentally friendly then an electric car.

DR. BRANSBY: Okay. And that’s real important. You know a lot of people may see a little bit of smoke coming off the gasifier and say that pollution. That’s not pollution. The biggest polluting factor of fossil fuels is that we’re taking carbon in the form of oil, and coal and even natural gas.  Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, it’s below the ground, we’re taking that carbon from a place where it is harmless and we’re pumping into the atmosphere and we are adding carbon to the atmospheric pool of carbon. So we’re increasing green house gases and therefore the risk of global warming.

With a vehicle like this, the wood obviously comes from trees, trees are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and when you then put that carbon in the gasifier, run it thru the vehicle you’re burning it and you’re releasing it again. Once you’ve burnt the carbon monoxide, you get carbon dioxide, after it’s gone thru the engine but you just cycling the carbon so this is a whole lot cleaner then using fossil fuels. It’s pretty much carbon neutral, whereas the fossil fuels will be adding carbon all of the time because we’re taking it out of the ground and adding it to the atmosphere. So yea, that’s important.

Now we haven’t gone thru to the level, and we will be doing this soon, of checking what the tail pipe emissions are, because people fuss about that sometimes too. I would expect that they will meet all regulations. I don’t think that there would be any problems, unless he would put something with high nitrogen or high sulfur or something, which he’s not doing. All of this is low nitrogen, low sulfur material that he’s putting in there, and so I wouldn’t expect any problems with the tailpipe emissions either.

T-CO CAMERAMAN: And with this technology, do you plan to retro-fit vehicles or produce them new off of the line like this?

WAYNE KEITH: I think we may be planning on building some trucks and putting them up for sale, maybe in the future. We’re going to discuss that. It’s a complicated procedure. One needs to understand the gasification process and I think they can do okay with it.

DR. BRANSBY: I think it’s a reasonable question that you ask. I think that there will be a market for this type of vehicle and we would like to attempt to meet any demand that there is for those. But, really, the main point that we’re trying to get across to the public is that we can do all kinds of things with biomass. That anything you can do with fossil fuels you can do with biomass and maybe even more. And with the current oil price, we can probably do it cheaper too. Now of course Wayne just indicated that this is all scrap wood so he travels for free except for maintenance on the vehicle, he has no fuel costs.

WAYNE KEITH: I think what we’re showing people is you don’t have to have liquid fuel to run a vehicle. You can run a vehicle off of solid material if need be.

T-CO CORESPONDANT: Were there any modifications done to the engine itself in order to run this?

WAYNE KEITH: Minor modifications, very minor.

T-CO CORESPONDANT: I’ve got a quick, is that barrel hot?

DR. BRANSBY: It’s hot enough that you can’t hold your hand here, but I can touch it without, so it’s inside it’s going to double layer here, but inside you’re looking at 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit very, very hot. But the outside, because of the way Wayne’s built it, it’s very well insulated so no one can really get hurt.

T-CO CORESPONDANT: Wayne, was this your idea, did you actually come with the idea and build it?

WAYNE KEITH: The gasification process has been around since World War Two. I know. Now there’s been a lot of changes. if we look at the World War Two gasification systems and look at the cars that they were using that day, there’s just about that much in lateral. There’s a lot of new bells and whistles that I put on this. In World War Two they didn’t run 80 and 90 miles an hour down the road.

DR. BRANSBY: Gasification. The concept is pretty old but the design that Wayne has developed here is unique.

T-CO CAMERAMAN: And as far as the feedstock goes, do you have to use, I mean what if there’s nails in the wood or it’s real wet or anything effect it like that?

WAYNE KEITH: We don’t like to. I burn wet wood. We got wet wood right here. I don’t like to burn green wood, there’s a difference. Nails don’t bother it they go on thru the grate. I might mention I’ve never cut a tree to run this vehicle or heat my house. I’ve always used scrap.

SCREEN DISPLAY TEXT: Biomass Powered Pick-up Truck (Bio-Truck)

Interview And Demonstration

Conducted During The
2008 Bioenergy Conference
Tifton, GA. USA
August 12-13, 2008

2008 copyright T-CO Alternative Fuels. LLC.

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