Through gasification, we can convert nearly any solid waste biomass into a clean burning, carbon neutral, gaseous fuel. Whether starting with wood chips or coffee grounds, municipal trash or agricultrual waste, the end product is a flexible gaseous fuel you can burn in your internal combustion engine, cooking stove, heating furnace and/or flamethrower. Upmigration to liquid fuels is also possible with some additional effort and common catalysts.
Well, over one million vehicles in Europe ran onboard gasifiers during WWII to make fuel from wood and charcoal, as gasoline and diesel were rationed and/or unavailable. Long before there was biodiesel and ethanol, we actually succeeded in a large-scale, alternative fuels redeployment-- and one which curiously used only cellulosic biomass, not the oil and sugar based biofuel sources which famously compete with food.
This redeployment was made possible by the gasification of waste biomass, using simple gasifiers about as complex as a traditional wood stove. These small-scale gasifiers are easily reproduced (and improved) today by DIY enthusiasts using simple hammer and wrench technology. The same principles are applied at much larger scale and complexity to recover a wide variety of municipal, agricultural, construction, forestry and industrial waste to energy, soil amendments and other useful end products.
ALL Power Labs now offers the Gasifier Experimenters Kit (GEK) to help you get starts in the biomass thermal conversion arts and sciences.