As for Gasogene
I used to be a blacksmith, but I didn't have a good supply of blacksmith coal and I was too poor to have it shipped to me. I tried using other types of coals but with poor results. However my now ex-girlfriends father had a saw mill with lots of wood scraps from the process, so I built a charcoal maker.
Very primitive in design..but it was a 55 gallon drum with a bunch of holes shot through it for air. It also had a old wheel hub from a truck in the center of it which the fire was built around. I built the fire using the waste slab wood from the mill, old news papers for kindling and spoiled heating oil from a freind who was a furnace repair man. while the fire was going I would pack more wood tightly into a 30 gallon grease drum (which had been power washed). Once the fire was going well I would place a 30 gallon grease drum on the fire and it sat on top of the old truck wheel hub. The grease drum had no holes except for it had a nail hole in its tightly sealing top. I would continue to add slabs into the oil drum as the fire burned down. As the wood in the grease drum was burned without allowing oxygen (or destructively distilled) it turned the wood into charcoal. All the while dark brownish to greenish grey smoke would pour out the hole in the lid. If the lid was actually airtight it would have blown off. However if you took a burning splint and put it to the smoke it would ignite and burn about 3 inches off the top of the hole in the barrel like a propane gas pilot.
My ex's dad was a small engine repair man and he always wanted to try to trap and pressurize the gas much like they do with methane gas using an inverted cone in a concrete tube with water above it. As the gas pressure increases the cone rises and eventually the gas will condensate at the right pressure into a liquid where it can be tapped off much like LNG.
However it never got more advanced than a simple charcoal maker.
Brother in Arms
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