Wayne Keith's Wood Gas Fleet -- 250,000 Miles Without Gasoline

Alabama cattle farmer Wayne Keith has not purchased a single gallon of gasoline since 2004. Instead, he drives on wood. Keith designed and built his own gasifier systems that convert scrap lumber, sawmill waste, and fallen branches into flammable syngas -- a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that runs a standard internal combustion engine with zero modifications to the motor itself. The gasifier bolts into the bed of a pickup truck, and a cord of wood gets him between 5,000 and 7,000 miles of driving range. Over two decades, Keith has converted nine trucks to run on wood gas, logging more than a quarter million miles across all of them combined. His most famous rig, a 1993 Dodge Dakota, made the 2,000-mile trek to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, where it set the world speed record for a wood-powered vehicle at 73.09 mph -- nearly doubling the previous record of 46 mph held by a Swedish team. Keith estimates he has saved over $40,000 in fuel costs, all while running his farm equipment on what most people would call yard waste. His homemade "wood chunker" was fabricated from the differential and brake drum of an old International truck, processing 2,000 pounds of fuel per hour. His book "Have Wood Will Travel" has become the bible of the wood gasification community.