Economic evaluation of operation of vehicles on wood gas
3.4.1 The case for wood gasifiers
Installation of a gasifier system on a vehicle involves a certain investment, leads to somewhat impaired performance, and increased time required for service, maintenance and repair. All this can be translated into increased costs for the vehicle. Wood gas operation is only economically feasible if these costs are outweighted by the savings on fuel costs.
It can be inferred from this that wood gas operation will be most competitive in situations where the annual utilization of the vehicle is high, the labour wages low and the price difference between petroleum fuels and wood is large.
An attempt will be made below to identify the ranges for these parameters where wood gas operation may be a competitive alternative.