(To the fules crisis)?
As late as 1970, Boston still had a town gas (CO) system, and the gas was produced by combustion/cracking coal. We have lots of coal, can a car then run on compressed town gas? Yes, those gas plants were smelly and dirty-but we have PLENTY of coal.
Would converting cars to burn compressed carbonmonoxide work?
How much energy would the town gas have, per unit volume? is it better than ethyl alcohol?
What you actually get is a mixture of water-gas and producer-gas, made by heating coke white-hot and blowing steam over it, which gets reduced to hydrogen and CO but cools the coke, followed by air, which gives you CO and nitrogen but warms the coke again. When you made the coke in the first place you cracked off all the volatile parts of the original coal, some of which can make a useful oil or even fuel gas in their own right, and are generally useful industrial products otherwise.
However…
Carbon monoxide is not really something you want to carry around in motor vehicles, I would have thought. It’s really dangerous in quite modest concentrations as well as being combustible, and it’s about the same density as nitrogen so it doesn’t even blow away all that easily when it’s spilled. And of course it’s not exactly cutting down on carbon emissions.
“Suicide is never the answer, little trooper!” – Charles De Mar, Better Off Dead
Stranger