March 31st, 2008 · No Comments

The problem, of course, is that biodiesel is arguably not widely available, though a diesel vehicle owner can still get around by bridging with diesel fuel, which is sold at gas stations everywhere. Tickell, who’s written two books on biodiesel, also maintains a website AboutBiodieselAmerica with a map of where you can fill up on veggie fuel, does not explore this distribution problem adequately in his film. But he does make a strong case for diesel engines as part of the solution.

“The diesel engine is by far the dominant engine on Earth and everyone one of them can run on biodiesel without modification,” he narrates.

And so we follow our earnest movie maker to Las Vegas, Berkeley, New York City and a few European locales, to see inspired uses of tractor-trailer trucks, buses and cars with diesel engines. The emissions record of these vehicles is not stellar when they are run on diesel fuel (though it’s been improved). But their redeeming feature endures. They can be instantly converted to biodiesel, which is energy efficient (having a much higher BTU output per BTU to manufacture than gasoline) and produces clean emissions.

It sounds like a wonderful world. But now for the updating part: Biofuels made from corn and soybeans are currently under fire for displacing cropland. As the demand for ethanol (a mix of corn-derived alcohol and gasoline) and other biofuels has increased, American farmers found it was more lucrative to grow crops for fuel; which meant they grew less for food, which drove up prices, which prompted some overseas farmers to cut down more forests, such as the Amazon Rain Forest, to create more cropland.

Oil dependence is bad, yes. But deforestation, which releases carbon into the atmosphere, is not the answer.

Fortunately, Tickell, being a bright guy, gets this, and Fields of Fuel touches on the solutions, such as using switch grass, or even garbage, to make biofuels and the promising potential that fast-growing algae could make an oil-like fuel to replace the problematic corn-based ethanol. He notes that biofuels are not a “magic elixir” and prominently features another bright fellow, Michael Noble, with the advocacy group Fresh Energy. Noble says the answers to our energy woes – both in terms of global warming and supply – should come from three main sources: biofuels (particularly biodiesel), renewable energy (solar, wind, electric cars) and mass transit.

It’s a sign of the filmmaker’s confident grasp of the issues, that he addresses these other aspects of the dynamic energy picture, much like a lawyer acknowledging a piece of evidence that would otherwise dangle. After the Dallas screening, he conceded that biodiesel is not the total answer, and that ultimately, the world may need to move through three generations of transportation fuels, from biofuels on the market now, to the newer biofuels still in laboratories to hopefully, some sort of carbon-recapture (closed-loop) non-polluting means of propulsion.

We wish him good luck in collecting the dangling ends in time for the summer release.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

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