Making biofuel out of wood

[VinHeaven]

Hey guys,

i think about adding a late-game process for turning wood into biofuel (pure ethanol) to use in gasoline engines.

The approach would be:

1. Purchase some incredients.

• Get concentrated acid (hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid etc.) for breaking up the cellulose.
• Get water.
• Turn wood into wood chips.

2. Put acid, water, and wood chips into a sturdy tank. Acid is bad for metal, so maybe a plastic tank. Wait some time until the acid has done its job.

3. (optional) Cook the woodsugar solution to get rid of the acid.

4. Ferment the (non-eatable) woodsugar with additional water and some yeast into a woodsugar-ethanol solution.

5. Distill the woodsugar-ethanol solution and get pure ethanol.

6. Pour the ethanol into your vehicle and steamroller some zombies.

Some Annotations:

To 1.
Acid:
There is a recipe for acid water (which can be cooked into concentrated acid) out of water, but i think this is way to simple for a practically unlimited source of fuel. A viable solution would be hydrochloric acid. You could produce hydrochloric acid out of water and salt (swamps somebody?) by using the chemistry set.

Wood chips
These could be craftable by hand with a knife (extremely tedious) or by adding an electric wood chipper as a vehicle part (warranty void if used to get rid of zombies).

To 2.
Maybe we could use a simple plastic jerrycan, but i think 10 liters is insufficient for our purposes. A constructable structure out of plastic and metal with a much bigger capacity would be better.

To 3.
Just use the existing fermenting vat (does someone know the capacity?) to ferment the woodsugar.

To 4.
Use the existing distill (does it work?) to get the pure ethanol. Maybe each alcoholic fluid (wine, whiskey etc.) could be used to distill pure ethanol.

I know there is a recipe for turning wood into sugar but i think again its way to easy for making fuel. But maybe you could grow yeast with the woodsugar.

That are my ideas to a somewhat realistic and feasible approach to biofuel production. I would be glad if you guys could share your thoughts and suggestions.

[Darkfirephoenix]

And there is the “Turning Wood into Bio/fuel” idea again. I’m for it as usual. (Hint: Maybe you should first search the forum about the topic you are about to post)

[jcd]

I support this.

4. Distill the woodsugar-ethanol solution and get pure ethanol.

However it is no small task to get acceptably pure ethanol (96%+). The survivor should have to do many (3?, 5?) distillations in order to achieve needed purity.

Let us assume that all gasoline cars will be able to burn pure ethanol though. In the future this could well be the case.

[DeWolf]

[quote=“jcd, post:3, topic:9554”]I support this.

4. Distill the woodsugar-ethanol solution and get pure ethanol.

However it is no small task to get acceptably pure ethanol (96%+). The survivor should have to do many (3?, 5?) distillations in order to achieve needed purity.

Let us assume that all gasoline cars will be able to burn pure ethanol though. In the future this could well be the case.[/quote]
Perhaps the ability to forge a crude ethanol engine.

[Darkfirephoenix]

[quote=“DeWolf, post:4, topic:9554”][quote=“jcd, post:3, topic:9554”]I support this.

4. Distill the woodsugar-ethanol solution and get pure ethanol.

However it is no small task to get acceptably pure ethanol (96%+). The survivor should have to do many (3?, 5?) distillations in order to achieve needed purity.

Let us assume that all gasoline cars will be able to burn pure ethanol though. In the future this could well be the case.[/quote]
Perhaps the ability to forge a crude ethanol engine.[/quote]
Most modern engines can handle ethanol, and for the ones that can’t: You have just to change some settings for the combustion (either mechanical or via electronics) due to the fact that gas, diesel and ethanol have different properties (some need less compression etc.). A conversion from gas to ethanol is something a good mechanic can do on their own (it could be a simple crafting recipe from gas to ethanol engine)

[kevin.granade]

There has never been any serious opposition to this idea, it’s just that no one has gotten around to it. Something that would help would be a step-by-step process for making it, listing tools, ingredients with quantities, and times for each step. Also an estimate of the skill level required would be good.

I don’t see a problem allowing either creation of “woodgas” to keep things simple, or allowing most engines to burn ethanol.
A slightly more sophisticated approach would allow you to cut gasoline with (more) ethanol to some limit for regular gas engines, or use pure ethanol in engines that are designed for it, possibly with actions you can take to prep an engine to handle it.

For wood chips and/or sawdust, these would also be created by a lot of different wood cutting activities, so I suspect by the time you have the abilities to set up the ethanol distillation and such you’ll probably have quite a lot of it lying around.