Recently, I watched the movie Fuel. I have been wanting to do more reviews on the website (of both books and movies related to topics discussed on the blog) and I didn’t really know where to start. I have seen quite a few (movies & books) that I thought would be interesting to review and figured this would be a nice start. I’ve got a couple other books to review as soon as I read them, and hopefully I can get some more movies as well. Anyways, On to the review.
Fuel:
This movie started out with the story of the filmmaker, Josh Tickell when he was in college. He’s got quite an interesting story, he grew up in Louisana and went to college, found himself in Europe during for his studies. He worked on an organic farm that was using biodiesel in the tractors, and for the longest time, he didn’t know it. He was completely astounded by the fact that he was growing the fuel for his trucks he was using to do farm work on the farm he was working on. When he got back to the states, he took got his student loan money, dropped out of school, bought a diesel winnebago and created the veggie mobile. He powered the veggie mobile with used fryer grease he collects while driving the veggie mobile across the country. He wrote a book about it, spoke all over the country about it, and really felt like he was making a difference.
Once he explains his backstory, he goes into some parts about where oil comes from, how it’s produced and refined and what’s done with it. I wasn’t terribly interested in this part because I know most of it already, but will share it with you. They boil the crude oil, and collect at different levels and it makes different types of fuel: gas, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, asphalt, plastic and more. Here, he takes a his turn to swing at the previous presidential administration, saying they were in bed with the oil companies and blamed the military-industrial complex for the war in Iraq. While I feel that this is part of the puzzle, I wished he could have mentioned it briefly and moved on, but he didn’t.
After a while, biodiesel started gaining huge momentum and was being used in schools, truck stops and in gas stations across the country. He was pretty excited because he felt like he was really making a difference in the world and changing people habits. Then in 2007/2008, someone came out with a report that renewable fuels could be blamed for the deaths of people in rural africa. This brought around another round of things that biodiesel was tied into. He went into the farm system and the extremely high subsidies that the farmers get for production of commodity crops. These subsidies result in the US producing a higher amount of food at a lower cost than it costs for farmers around the world to produce the same crops, so they exit the market. These low production costs were brought to you by fuel, of course. So the premise is that if gas goes up by 25%, so would the cost of food. Unfortunately, this would stop crops from being distributed on the world market, and could lead to starvation because the local farmers have stopped production.
Just like that, all the progress was made from 2001-2007 evaporated. Josh was crushed, and went back to work promoting biodiesel. This is where it got interesting to me, because he started talking with all the new production biodiesel companies and the different places they could get their fuels and how they were developing new biodiesel from alge. It was really interesting to hear a lot of old oil men talking about the benefits of biodiesel and how great it it could be if it could be grown from alge. They talked about putting the alge next to power plants and using the c02 emissions from the power plant and the sun to grow the alge.
Most Important Points:
- The diesel engine was invented to run on peanut oil
- Most of the ships, trains, buses and other heavy equipment run on diesel fuel
- To be truly sustainable, you need to make use of as much waste as possible
- Oil/Fuel is used or needed for just about everything that you use, touch or do.
Should you watch this? I think so. I think he distilled a lot of information in a very easy to digest and interesting way. I’m excited to see what he comes up with next. The one downfall of this movie (though completely out of the authors control) was that it wasn’t up to date. This sounds rather odd to say as I think it was released in 2008, but so much has happened since then, and it would be nice to hear his take on what’s going on currently.
If you’ve seen it, what do you think?
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