Save yourself the brain aneurism from watching anti-science 1990’s “perpetual motion” bullshit and look up “wood gasification (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator)

Its not some secret or “free energy”. It is just converting energy from wood in a 2 step process -instead of burning it directly for heat, you extract the flammable gas, which is a more flexible energy source (and can be used in internal combustion engines like generators). Its been around for a long time. The Nazi’s even tried to run a tank on it.

Today, many large scale “biogas” reactors use similar mechanisms, though they typically use bacteria to produce gas rather than heat from partial combustion, which allows them to work on things that don’t burn cleanly, like garbage or sewage. I know a hobbyist that built a traditional combustion-based wood gasifier generator- it worked, but was a lot of work to keep the gas flowing and engine running. No free energy, you still need the (bio) fuel.

Def gives “It runs on water, maaaaaan! They made a car that runs on Water!” vibes.

Anyone who isn’t high as a kite will see the problems immediately, especially since many of them are pointed out in the video explicitly.

1. You need a lot of land. This thing is the size of a small house.
2. You need a lot of organic material. Their OG had literal tons of free forest waste to work with.
3. It takes time and energy. The video more or less explicitly states that you can’t do this as a fun hobby - it is part of a larger lifestyle, that is essentially a part or full time job.
4. It takes knowledge and skills. Sure, you can read a book about it, but there are going to be gotchas that the OG forgot to mention or which are specific to your location. After busting ass for weeks and maintaining the thing for months, you might get nothing but a smelly pile of sludge.

Also, you are collecting methane, which can kill you if too much leaks in your house, or if you catch it on fire in the wrong conditions and it explodes. Also, it’s a greenhouse gas if it leaks, which is likely, since the person collecting it is a hippy DIYer working with a pile of wood chips. I honestly am not super concerned about either of these points - the amount of methane lost would probably be about the same as would be produced if the chips just rotted on the ground, and if you managed to successfully get this thing working, you probably have enough homesteading skill to not blow yourself up. But still…

Anyway, no, you really shouldn’t be outraged. The governments and corporations are not trying to “keep this knowledge from us.” It simply isn’t relevant to almost anyone. You essentially need to have already made a choice to be an off-grid homesteader in order to have the land, time, resources, skill, and interest to do this.

Also, it doesn’t scale well. Even if there was a real surge in homesteading and off-grid living and hundreds of millions around the world started making their big composting piles, we would eventually run out of wood chips. Yeah, wood chips are cheap right now because there isn’t a ton of demand - but if demand goes up, then either supply must go up or price does. And even if supply increases in a good way initially (say, using trees and downed branches as part of wildfire mitigation or blight remediation), eventually the only way to increase supply will be to chop down trees specifically for the purpose of producing compost energy.

Actual use of this technology at scale does seem interesting. I imagine we could harvest some amount of energy from composting existing waste wood chips and organic garbage, especially if the solution were engineered by a competent team of experts, not just a hippy in their back yard. But then the question is if the labor - the cost of paying people to stare at spreadsheets and run engineering simulations, and the cost of paying people to push mulch around with a backhoe - is worth the resultant energy and fertilizer output. And under current economic conditions, it probably isn’t.

This is a cool project to do if you really want to do it. But the real answer to having abundant energy was hinted at, but never really explicitly stated, in the video. Reducing Consumption. Of course you can power your whole life from a compost pile if you don’t use that much power. And the best way to use less power while not full-sending an offgrid lifestyle is to live in a city where you need to use less power. A well-designed apartment has lower heating and cooling costs because it shares those costs with 8 other apartments around it. A person riding their bike to work uses less power than someone commuting by car, which is possible when places are close together and streets are designed for human safety. Food that isnt corn takes less energy to get to your table when your table is close to a major food distribution hub instead of being in the middle of a corn field.