I don’t have a cite to link to, but I’m danged curious about this concept that I got in an email.
So, is it simply a “producer gas” engine, or is there something else going on here?
I remember a couple of years ago, something along these lines was discussed on Car Talk (the click and clack guys). Apparently fuel was so scarce in Germany towards the end of WW II (and afterwards) that many Germans converted their cars to run on wood. I don’t recall the details, but it sounds like a very similar setup.
I wish I could be more helpful, but hopefully this will at least give you some other things to search for that will help you track this down.
I did some googling and found this:
Well, I am familiar with producer gas vehicles (and one of these days, I’m going to get this book on the subject), but I’ve never heard of it being called “hydrogen” before. So I’m wondering if there’s not something else going on here, or if the the writer of the original piece (or the guy that converted the truck) doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. (The original source is an AP story.)
If you feed water (well, steam in effect) into red-hot charcoal, you get a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That’s a higher energy fuel than carbon monoxide alone, so your upper power limit is higher. That’s assuming power is limited by the engine at open throttle burning the low-energy carbon monoxide fuel, and not by the amount of gas the gasifier can produce.
But you don’t get the hydrogen for free - the reaction between steam and carbon is endothermic, so it consumes heat. You have to have enough air running into the burning charcoal to balance this heat loss with the heat-producing combustion-to-carbon-monoxide reaction. So hydrogen is only going to be a proportion of your fuel gas, and you have to have a water injector fitted to your gasifier.
If you’re starting with wood rather than charcoal, it may already contain a little water but I’d have thought it’d all be driven off as steam before the gasifier got hot enough to produce hydrogen, or indeed carbon monoxide.
Not wood burning, but a (bit of a crazy) guy I know here had a diesel truck he was running on the left over oil from the deep fryers at his restaurant. This worked for a while just fine, I even drove the thing, but something went wrong with it recently. I know it worked for about six months.
Yeah, that’s called biodiesel, and is gaining in popularity. Of course, it only works in diesel engines.
I have never been in the military, but a friend of mine was on a tank crew (I’m sure there’s a more official name for that) and he always told me the tank engines could burn just about any liquid fuel that was available. Anyone know how true this is?
E3
Soooo… what do you heat the wood with to produce the gas. Burn wood?
Yeah, it’s true, because the engines in tanks are turbines.
Here in NC they color kerosene red so truck drivers can’t use it instead of diesel fuel and avoid taxes. Don’t know how well it works, though.
Don’t know about using deep fryer fat to run a Diesel. Sounds like this might clog the “arteries” (read injectors) of the engine kinda like it does to us.
CPR for Diesels anyone? 
The only problems I’ve ever heard of with biodiesel is that is some times dissolves the fuel lines on late model VWs, but that’s pretty easy to fix. IAC, you can read all about biodiesel here.
A rather more humourous problem (if it isreally a problem) with biodiesel is happening to a bunch of environmentalists who are promoting it by driving a biodiesel van around Australia. They ask for used cooking oil from fast food places, the owners of which are usually delighted to get rid of the stuff. The problem is that, depending on where they have last been, the van smells of fish ‘n’ chips, or Chinese takeout, or felafels, or … or… You get the idea. 
Leading me to ask this question some weeks back.
There are piston engines that run on any liquid fuel aren’t there? IIRC they run with a high compression and ignite anything?
Not that I’m aware of. There are piston engines which can run on a variety of fuels, but not just anything that’s liquid and flammable. There’s just too great a difference between fuel characteristics, I believe, for that to be possible.
This probably isn’t what you’re thinking of, but Stirling engines can run on any fuel. Or any heat source, for that matter.
A diesel can run on straight vegetable oil…if it is preheated to lower the oil’s viscocity.
Preheating the fuel line with hot antifreeze does the trick…but first you must start with bio- or dino-diesel until the engine is at operating temperature, and also purge the fuel line at shut-down to prevent the oil from clogging up the works when it cools down and thickens up.
And greasel.com sells a conversion kit to do this. I have a co-worker who has this on two of his vehicles.
A diesel could run on about anything. However it will not last. The injection pump requires that the fuel lubricate it. Gasoline is a horrible lubricant for example.