Watched the tv show Cool fuel where these Australians are traveling around the country using nothing but alternative fuels.

Today they started out in New Orleans and he and his dog had to get from there to the Texas border. They rode with a guy that was on the show before with a corn sippin' BMW. This time however, he had an old style hummer with a gasification unit on the back.

Aparently, you block the exhaust off. Feed an alternate pipe into what looked like a big cylinder on the back with an exhaust stack. Not sure of specifics inside the tank. Anyhow, the exhaust runs straight into there, heats the stuff you put inside, turns it into a gas. The gas exits the unit and fed back through the exhaust pipe towards the engine where it comes out and is tied into your fuel system or intake, not sure which.

What you put in the tank, well, they started with the New Orleans donut things with the powder on top, can't remember what they were called. They put them in a blender, added a touch of ethynol, little bit of soy bean oil, blended it into a smoothie and poured it into this tank on the back. I think they used 6 or 8 blenders full and got from New Orleans to Lafeyette. Where they had crawfish and filled up on blended crawfish waste, after dinner.

The guy said they were getting 12mpg out of this thing using food. He also said you could use a bunch of stuff, cereal, oranges(really good by the way) but it was good to have stuff with a higher fat content, protein or oils, like the orange peels.

Truly amazing to watch them pour a milkshake type goo into this tank and then drive away! There was a website name on the side of the hummer but all I can remember is ECO something.com

Guess a "doggy bag" after dinner does not mean it's going to fido at home, goin in my truck. This guy bought groceries at the store and was telling the girl at checkout about it. She kinda had that look like, "is this guy nuts?" Plus his heavy Australian accent, it was funny and cool!

 

That is whacked.. wow.
There have been publications about reducing plant matter and animal carcases into a gas or a liquid fuel. How much energy is used to do this compared to what you get, no clue.
I still -really- think we should be concentrating on making fuel oils with bacteria or algae. It makes the most sense all around. I wish there were some startup companies up here in the northeast, I might give that a go.

 

There's a company that's now turning turkey processing waste into biofuels, and doing it at a cost of @$15/barrel. They have an experimental plant outside Philly, and they're in the middle of construction on a full size plant out in Arkansas (I think).
As far as the gassification thing goes, there was a race earlier this year for alternative fuelled vehicles. The rules included that you start with a "tankful" of whatever your fuel is, then you had to mooch the rest of what you needed to complete the trip. It was from Berkeley to Vegas. Something like 26 entries, but only 2 finished. The winner was a Lotus 7 clone using a tiny diesel running on WVO; the second place guy was a Dodge Dakota using a wood-fuelled gassification furnace that filled the back of the truck. Everyone else DNF'ed, including some Mercedes greasecars and a couple solar/battery conversions.

 

These guys on this show(on the science channe-Cool Fuels) the guy driving the oddball stuff has to mooch his fuel too, electric to charge the battery powered motorcycle,but the electric has to come from renewable resources, i.e, wind, methane from cows etc. WVO from restuarants and so on. The rv that travels with him has to run on bio only and they are/were doing a 14,000 road trip around the U.S.A. It's a cool show, they stopped at this couples house out in the middle of nowhere Arizona and no power lines in site. They had a decent size wind turbine and solar panels that powered the whole house. When asked how much to put in power lines they said, $25,000, how much for the turbine/panels, $12,000 plus no electric bills.