You are on your own. The Army is MIA and our government is gone! There are no communications of any kind. Cities and towns have gone dark, and zombies fill the streets. The dead have risen and it would seem to be the end of the world. Help me, Mommy!
Two words... Moon... Shine Seriously. You can distill alcohol from virtually any form of plant matter and scaring up the materials for a still means a quick raid of your local hardware store. Copper tubing is easy enough to come by, just gut an air conditioner. Then set up a covered kettle, get a slow fire under it to cook your mash and let it go. The drawback to this is the need for a seriously secure area. Distilling any appreciable amount of alcohol to run a car on takes about 3 or more days. It would also help to have a mechanic around to tweak the car a bit so it can efficiently run on alcohol without burning the engine out. Either that or have a vehicle with a flex-fuel engine. Chevy and Ford both have some very nice models and a lot of military vehicles are built that way, such as the HMMWV, the 5-ton trucks and most light armored vehicles. Flex-Fuel engines are nice because they require no modification to efficiently run on whatever fuel is put in them. If it burns, it runs.
Sure, lions and tigers are stronger... But I've never seen a wolf jump through hoops in a circus
JuliusCreed wrote:Two words... Moon... Shine Seriously. You can distill alcohol from virtually any form of plant matter and scaring up the materials for a still means a quick raid of your local hardware store. Copper tubing is easy enough to come by, just gut an air conditioner. Then set up a covered kettle, get a slow fire under it to cook your mash and let it go. The drawback to this is the need for a seriously secure area. Distilling any appreciable amount of alcohol to run a car on takes about 3 or more days. It would also help to have a mechanic around to tweak the car a bit so it can efficiently run on alcohol without burning the engine out. Either that or have a vehicle with a flex-fuel engine. Chevy and Ford both have some very nice models and a lot of military vehicles are built that way, such as the HMMWV, the 5-ton trucks and most light armored vehicles. Flex-Fuel engines are nice because they require no modification to efficiently run on whatever fuel is put in them. If it burns, it runs.
You need more than a still. You can't pureify the alcohol enough to run a vehicle on it. Flex-fuel still requires some amount of gasoline, 15%. None are pure ethanol burners, and the ethanol needs to be about 99.9% pure in the mix for flex fuel vehicles. You could maybe retune an engine to run on pure ethanol, and with a higher water content, but you are still probably going to need to be over 95% pure ethanol. Water isn't compressable, so it causes some serious issues with combustion as well as cooling the ignition which if enough can quench the combustion flame.
Back yard distillation can't get higher than 96% purity in theory, and less in practice. It takes a lot of distillation cycles to manage that. At best with a really good setup, you might be able to make fuel grade ethanol, but it is going to be pretty difficult. You can mix lower grade ethanol in with gasoline and it'll burn just fine, but the higher the amount of water the poorer the combustion process is going to be in an engine.
Vegetable oils would be my plan and some diesel trucks and gennys. -Matt
How am I going to power things? Easy - solar or wind power. It's easy enough to build a wind turbine to generate a little bit of power, and with the right tools and equipment you could build a small farm of them. Then you run the power into couple of battery packs from a prius, leaf, or volt, and you can store the energy. Once there, you've got an ample way to plug in electrical cords and power other vehicles, generators, or even power tools.
I think my answer has complete merit here. No, they aren't consumed in a chemical reaction, and they aren't considered "fuel" per se. But my answer solves the problem of how to power vehicles and other devices after the world collapses and we run out of fuel. Which I think was the basis for the OP's original line of thought.
Luckluster wrote:Fuel: –noun "Combustible matter used to maintain fire, as coal, wood, oil, or gas, in order to create heat or power."
Sorry Severus, but solar and wind energy does not count here as they are not consumed in a chemical reaction.
But to answer the question...
Personally I would use wood gasification. It is a very old technology that works well, and is easy to set up with basic hand tools and some junk yard parts. The only drawback to it would be having to find/cut/scrounge the wood(Having been consumed to create power). That alone would require some considerable effort. However, if your safe haven was in a wooded area you wouldn't have to many problems.
Survivors of the apocalypse would have to learn how to do things the old ways. Perhaps steam generation would work as well if you had the right equipment.
Gas as we all know goes bad after several years. So unless you can find and refine oil(From old cars perhaps?), gasoline powered engines would need to be modified to run on a new source of fuel. Also I would not use a modern vehicle to get around with. Their complexity makes it hard to maintain them for more than five to ten years. I would use an older truck or car instead(1960's-70's). Their complexity is far less and they can be jury rigged much easier.
Speaking of gasification, I had a crazy thought. Now, for gasification to produce fuel you need some sort of biomass. What about using dead zombies? There'd be plenty of bodies (biomass) around a safe haven, and you'd be cleaning up your area to help prevent smell and disease.
Any accident you can walk away from is one I can laugh at.
Famous Last Words: Trust me, it isn't dangerous. I know exactly what I'm doing. Y'all come watch this.
Modern gas goes stale in part because of the process used to make it these days (chemical cracking) isn't as stable as older processees were. This combined with moisture infiltration in to the gas will also mess with it.
If stored with fuel drier additives, or in a well sealed tank in a low humidity environment it'll take a couple of years for gas to "go stale" at the soonest. It'll be flamable for a damned long time, but engines running on it are not going to run well at all on gas that is a few years old. Diesel engines will probably do a bit better on stale diesel, so long as stored with a fuel drier.
That said, especially with a carbeurated engine, you can run on stale fuel, so long as it is "dry". I've run lawn mowers and weed whackers on "stale" gas I've had stored in gas cans for 2-3 years with no fuel drier and they ran okay. I have also experienced "bad gas" because of it being stored too long (it worked when the gas was "new) when the engine in question wouldn't run on it. I had to empty the tank and fill it up with fresh gas and prime and attempt to start it a few times before it would fire properly.
Sure its doable, but it isn't all that pratical. With a few more resources you could just build a steam engine, and you could run that litterally on anything. With stainless steel and if you have brass in plenty you can easily make a light weight boiler and steam engine for something truck sized. It won't be super powerful, but more than enough to crank out 40 or 50hp.
Frankly considering how diesel engines can run on just about anything as it is, I'd just get a diesel. Veggie oils are pretty easy to make and biodiesel isn't much harder.
I would have to go with propane, It will never go stale as long as the container remains intact. converting any engine to it is a simple matter.. i could use that until i fully learned the task of refining all the un-refined crude oil sitting at refineries world wide. it too wont go stale as long as its crude.
