Fuel

Blue Water Entertainment and Open Pictures

Josh Tickell Productions

Cinema Libre Studio

This is not just another doco about the evils of the oil industry. Promisingly, it looks in depth at the alternatives to oil for the future. There are more than I thought and producer Josh Tickell goes into more detail on them than I have seen before.

The story is really in four separate strands. There is the personal side. His mother’s family lives along the stretch of the Louisiana bayou where there is one of the world’s largest concentrations of oil refineries between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The air, water and ground are polluted and the cancer rate is abnormally high. Josh’s family members have been dying from unusual causes for many years, and it seems the fumes and pollution may also be affecting the reproductive process of residents.

The second strand is the political side – oil companies tied with Government is a sure recipe for no change. Josh feels that people power will be the only way that this combination can be broken. He quotes from Ghandi: “Where the people lead, the leaders will follow”. Good luck, since there appears to be no large-scale organised resistance to the oil lobby.

As an alternative to this, though, Josh gives us examples of where individual actions have had an effect. Las Vegas has one of the country’s biggest fleets of school buses and they all now use biodiesel made from soy, maize or recycled vegetable oil. There was no conversion cost – oil-based diesel and biodiesel are completely compatible. Many truck drivers are now convinced of the value of biodiesel and change over to it whenever it is available. I was interested to find that Rudolf Diesel’s original engine was designed to run on peanut oil. Unfortunately the move to biodiesel was undermined by discussions on the cost of growing crops for fuel rather than for food. Josh points out that the U.S. needs cheap food to export in exchange for imported oil.

The third strand is the alternatives currently available. Many green movements are dedicated to solar as the only future power source, and it has its advantages. The cost of making and setting up solar plants is high, though, and solar energy is not really suitable for transport use unless converted and stored as electricity. This adds further to the cost. He looks at alternatives that can use the existing infrastructure. For transport, he feels that a return to biodiesel is the way of the future. Apart from recycled vegetable oil he looks at companies that are producing biodiesel from algae beds – the original way that the oil reserves were formed. Experiments suggest that oil can be harvested from algae in as little as three days. The algae need warm water, carbon dioxide and sunlight – conditions that exist already at many power stations. Is it possible that a power station could become almost self-sufficient in its own fuel production? I have not seen this proposition discussed before.

Apart from algae, biomass (trees, vegetable waste) can also be processed into fuels. Scientists are developing a Megaflora tree that reaches maturity in three years and could provide the needed amount of biomass quickly and cheaply. It also has the advantage that it can be grown in marginal lands and can actually improve the soil by removing toxic components. It will not require croplands to be converted to oil crops and it is comparatively low cost because the tree regenerates from its own stump, eliminating the need for costly replanting..

In the fourth strand Josh looks at ways of making our cities more self-sufficient, not only by energy saving but by such logical moves as growing food in the cities to avoid the transport costs. We see an example of a futuristic “vertical farm” that could use a footprint of one city block to produce significant amounts of food such as fruit and vegetables. The usual alternatives like solar and biodiesel are looked at but Josh examines them in the far more intelligent context of being just a part of the total solution. It is this rational mixed approach to the technologies that I find makes the documentary so much more credible.

There are negatives in the documentary. There are the usual figures given out without a source to back them up, he is coy about the capital cost of setting up the new technologies, and he relies a lot on people power ( a notoriously short-span thing) to make the political changes necessary. Apart from these, though, I think he is on the right track.

Reviews appear on the Synergy website with a single cover image. In the digital and print edition, reviews appear with multiple images and with expanded content.

This review will appear in Volume 3 No. 5 of the digital and print edition of Synergy.

We recommend you download the free digital edition (or buy the print edition) to get the most from Synergy. The print and digital editions of Synergy also include a large selection of articles and features not found on the website. If you have a limited download quota you can view the digital edition via the Issuu viewer on the digital edition page.

If you came to this page directly (and missed our menu), click here to go to the front page of Synergy Website or use the following link: http://www.synergy-magazine.com