Producer gas

Imagine you are playing with your toy stove and you want to cook something. You need fire to cook so you put some pieces of wood in the stove and start the fire. The fire makes the wood hot and changes it into a substance called charcoal.

Now imagine that instead of cooking on the stove, you have a big machine where you put a lot of wood and start a fire. This machine is called a gasifier and it turns the wood into something called producer gas. Producer gas is a type of fuel that can be used in engines and power generators.

How does the machine turn wood into producer gas?

The machine works by heating up the wood to a very high temperature without letting it burn completely. This process is called pyrolysis (pie-raw-lee-sis) and it breaks down the wood into different gases, like carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and solid pieces of char. These gases are then cooled and cleaned before they can be used as fuel.

So just like how you need fire to cook on your toy stove, factories and power plants need fuel to generate power. Producer gas is one type of fuel that can be made from wood and other materials.