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Wood Gasification: A Promising Strategy to Extend Fuel Reserves after Global Catastrophic Electricity Loss

  • D. Nelson, A. Turchin, D. Denkenberger
Published in Biomass on:
07 June 2024

Summary

The paper investigates how to extend the global food system's resilience in the event of a Global Catastrophic Infrastructure Loss (GCIL), such as a nuclear war or pandemic, when access to oil drilling and refining is lost. By combining wood gasification, increasing vehicle usage efficiency, and reducing food consumption, the duration of available fuel stockpiles could be extended from an average of 195 days to 757 days, with diesel identified as the limiting factor in all scenarios.

Pandemic, Nuclear winter, Wood gasification

Abstract

It is crucial to increase the resilience of the global food production and distribution systems against the growing concerns relating to factors that could cause global catastrophic infrastructure losses, such as nuclear war or a worldwide pandemic. Currently, such an event would result in the global loss of industry, including the ability to drill and refine crude oil. In such an event, the existing above-ground reserves of diesel and gasoline are likely to still be intact but would only be able to power the production and transportation of food between 158 days and 481 days with 80% confidence, where the mean is 195 days at current rates. This paper investigates a novel group of interventions in relation to the scenario of providing food under these conditions. It was found that by using a plausible combination of wood gasification, increasing vehicle utilisation rate, and reducing food consumption, the stockpile duration could increase to between 382 days and 1501 days with 80% confidence, where the mean is 757 days. This is an improvement in mean duration by a factor of 3.9. It was discovered that diesel is the limiting fuel in all scenarios due to wood gas only being a partial replacement for diesel fuel and also because of the prevalence of diesel engines in both the agricultural and trucking industries. A sensitivity analysis was completed identifying that reducing food consumption to minimum levels was the most effective method to prolong diesel reserves. The other factors that benefited from extending fuel reserves in terms of their effectiveness are reducing the lag time before gasification devices are installed, increasing the rate at which gasification devices are installed, and increasing the agricultural equipment utilisation rate.

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