One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?
Entering our current oil crunch, I think it’s obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that’s been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.
-
Best: The Postman. We’re back to walking and riding horses.
-
Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is–and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).
-
Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency–that would be too out there.
There is a lot of discussion about diesel and biodiesel, and alcohol.
But we have seen shortages of the liquid fuels before, and it is possible to run small engines on wood. They would have to convert but it is doable. Assuming there are trees or other carbon to burn.
This has been done before when petroleum was in short supply, such as in germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
You can actually use existing engines, and the gassifier is not terribly complicated. I don’t know this guy or his videos, https://youtu.be/522BaxM0Jnk but it is similar to others I have seen using a bicycle as the vehicle and a standard engine as the power, wood as the power source.
There are better and worse designs, and certainly not press the button and drive, but its an option.
These were wood powered:
EDIT: I almost forgot, you can make a gas generator station and fill a bag with it to use for the engine.
Like these vehicles here:
Nice! And it’s using a largely unprocessed resource, whereas food oils are processed and can be put to other uses (like food). You can’t eat wood.
Some caveats:
Works best with simple engines. Newer cars with their computers and fuel injection not so great.
Much less power and efficiency, but hey its an engine and at one time there were thousands of busses, cars, tractors, and even some trains that used this.
Also, probably best to convert the wood to charcoal. Not too hard to do at scale really. I think that would be easier to manage in the combuster and last longer.