The Garbage Can Is My Gas Pump

Reason Magazine has a long and fascinating article about an artist’s collective and squat in Berkeley called The Shipyard. After having the electricity shut off by the city, the collective was stuck with having to generate its own power. They tried various methods such as solar and biodiesel, but struck gold with an archaic process called gasification.

In a nutshell, gasification is a process of heating up any carbon-rich material in a special container that produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen which is then burned as fuel. These materials includes coal, petroleum and more importantly, biomass, plastic and items we would consider garbage. Besides running the squat on gasification, they also successfully powered cars by the process.

Perhaps the best news of all is that the waste product (called carbon char) is actually beneficial for the environment.

The key in making a 21st century environmentally friendly process out of an old 20th century machine is the char left over after gasification. In the Amazon rain forest, scientifically mysterious processes create a charcoal known as terra preta (“black earth”) or “agri-char,” which has been used for thousands of years to enrich the soil and boost agricultural productivity. More recently, it got a glowing write-up in Scientific American in May 2007 and made Wired’s “JargonWatch” this March.

By taking the leftover carbon char and plowing it back into the ground, gasification might do more than the mostly carbon-neutral act of burning biofuel. The process is potentially carbon-negative, keeping most of the carbon in the ground rather than the atmosphere while helping plants grow faster, which takes still more carbon out of the atmosphere.

Reason Magazine: Power To The People