I'm not suggesting it's the same stuff, but in the Army we used to fit desiccators to electronic equipment, tubes of silica gel, which absorbed any moisture inside the casings.
We'd swap them out regularly and fit dried ones. They were heated in small oven type devices for 24 hours to dry them and be ready for the next box of electronics.
The gel beads were just like those you get in the little bags you sometimes get when you buy an electrical/electronic item. I keep several in each draw in my workshop, just to keep everything in them from condensation.
Going back to the enviroGel David is using, pulling the moisture out of timber so fast sounds like it's only extracting the moisture from the first few millimeters depth of the timber.
It might be nice if you report back after you've let the blanks rest out of the gel for a few days and let us know if the moisture level has gone up (equalised) through the timber from your last reading.