“Yellow Gas”

First Published: Mar 21, 2026

With the missile strikes in Qatar and Iran on the oil facilities, gas is going to be at a premium soon. So you need to make every drop of it count.

Did you know you can make a variation of “gasoline” from other materials? The process is called gasification. And you just have to build a gasifier. Wood gasifiers have been running cars back in 1901 but it is a little more costly to modify modern cars to run on wood gas.

So we will make, what I call, “yellow gas” instead.

All you need is a metal container like a barrel, a metal pipe, a way to seal the barrel, a smaller metal container and hopefully an ice bath that will fit the smaller container.

You are going to drill a hole in the lid of the barrel, run the pipe through the hole and seal any leaks. We don’t want precious gas to escape. Ideally you would bend the pipe into a lot of coils, like a spring,

The pipe then goes into the smaller container and the hole in that container is also sealed.

The smaller container goes into the ice bath. If you have an enough twists in your pipe the ice bath is not needed but it will never hurt.

Next you are going to fill your barrel with as much plastic as you can. Grocery bags, zips locks, shampoo bottles, old toys. No styrofoam, etc. Cut up the plastic to make this work a little faster and easier.

Then seal your barrel up and set it over a fire.

If you are familiar with what a moonshine still looks like then your set up should remind you of that.

You are going to cook your plastic. Letting it melt and vaporize. Those vapors are going to travel the only way they can, into the pipe, through the coils, cooling down on the trip before depositing in the smaller cold container as a yellow liquid.

Now, you could run certain internal combustion engines off this “yellow gasoline.” It’s rough, dangerous, can damage your equipment and puts off highly toxic fumes but it’s doable. It’s not my recommend use for “yellow gas”.

You make “yellow gas” because it has other uses so you can free up your normal gas for engines. I suggest storing in a glass container, preferably the size of a beer bottle.

Oh you should probably keep a rag with the bottle….in case of spills.