This entry was updated on January 28 to reflect the film's award status.
PARK CITY, Utah--On one end of the documentary spectrum, you have films that are akin to extended works of journalism. They are in-depth, objective examinations of issues, personalities or phenomena that often leave you thinking that truth really is stranger than fiction.
A still from the film, Fields of Fuel, which is screening at Sundance.
(Credit: Fields of Fuel via Sundance)On the other end are advocacy films, which seem increasingly popular here at the Sundance Film Festival, particularly when it comes to politically charged issues such as the war in Iraq and the environment.
The latter type of documentary can be just as informative as the former, if done right. Take Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 festival film, which many people credit with having woken up the general public to the potentially grave consequences of global warming.
Another such example at this year's festival is Fields of Fuel, which received a long standing ovation at its first public screening here Monday. (Update: It turned out that Fields of Fuel won the festival's audience award for documentaries). In the film, director Josh Tickell tells the story of his life as an activist pushing for the use of biodiesel and other alternative fuels in an effort to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and protect the environment.
I tend to be wary of advocacy docs for fear they'll be feature-length brainwashers. But Tickell's film is fair, honest, informative and--a biggie for me--nicely edited. And I suppose it was convincing, too--it got me thinking about buying a car with a diesel engine and I went online to find the nearest biodiesel fuel pumps.
Josh Tickell has traveled the country trying to persuade consumers to switch to biofuels or other alternatives to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil.
(Credit: Fields of Fuel via Sundance)Tickell's efforts have already been well documented. (Click here for my colleague's story on his efforts.) He's written two books on biodiesel, done countless interviews and is perhaps best known for traveling the country in his biodiesel-powered "Veggie Van" to promote alternative fuel. But the documentary might just appeal to consumers in a different way.
I was a little turned off, especially at first, by the fact that he's telling his own story in scripted pseudo-interviews. I'd prefer someone else doing the interview, exposing us a little more to Tickell the person, as opposed to Tickell the activist. Viewers get a little of that, however, when he reflects upon his frustration at one point in the film when it seemed all his efforts had made no difference. "If anything, the U.S. slipped backwards," he says, reflecting on the early Bush years.
The audience was totally charged after the film as Tickell took the podium for a quick Q&A. He also brought up a huge cast and crew who he said had put "blood, sweat and tears," into the film.
Director Josh Tickell addresses the audience before the first public screening Monday of his Fields of Fuel at Sundance.
(Credit: Michelle Meyers/CNET News.com)Among the cast members were Jonathan Wolfson and Harrison Dillon, founders of a South San Francisco company called Solazyme, which makes biofuel out of algae. Solazyme demonstrated a car powered by its fuel at the festival and also announced a partnership with Chevron.
No word as of yet about Fields of Fuel getting picked up for distribution. Last year a similarly interesting activist documentary on global warming call Everything's Cool also got a warm Sundance reception, but never made it nationally to the big screen. (Thanks to a News.com reader who pointed out that the film had a small theater run in New York and Los Angeles.)
Among the other feature-length films at this year's festival with green themes are Flow: For the Love of Water, about why water is a dwindling resource; and Up the Yangtze, a film that quickly got bought for distribution about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and its effects on the lives of the locals and the environment.
There are also many environmental shorts screening, including Mr. W, by a Germany based filmmaking team called The Vikings. Mr. W, which preceded Fields of Fuel, is much better on the big screen but is totally worth a couple of YouTube minutes.
Algae's not the only organism that can be used as a feedstock for biofuel.
BP will collaborate with Arizona State University to try to figure out a way of using cyanobacteria, a photosynthetic form of bacteria, as a feedstock for diesel or synthetic petroleum. Ideally, the bacteria could be cultivated in large, contained plots of land baked by the sun--Arizona has a lot of that. The bacteria also consume carbon dioxide to grow. Thus, carbon dioxide could be pumped in from a power plant into the contained bacteria farm. The company could thus make money from selling carbon credits and selling fuel feedstock.
Financial details of the deal, announced Friday, were not disclosed.
GreenFuel Technologies has a similar project in Arizona under way but with algae. A lot of companies, in fact, are trying to concoct feedstocks out of algae. The race now is to figure out who can come up with a microorganism and a process that results in the cheapest, highest-energy feedstock. One of the challenges of algae: separating the single-celled buggers from the water they grow in.
Microbes are hot these days. Some companies, such as Cambrios Technologies, are trying to figure out ways to use microorganisms in industrial processes while others are trying to get microorganisms to convert wood chips into ethanol. Others are working on bacteria-based fuel cells.
Earlier this year, BP signed deals with University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois.
Algae fuel is going uptown.
Chevron, the honkin' big oil company, and the National Renewable Energy Labs have announced they will collaborate on identifying and developing strains of algae for fuel. Potentially, the research could result in jet fuel that uses algae as a feedstock.
The collaboration is part of a five-year deal, kicked off in 2006. The two are already cooperating on research for bio-oil reforming, which involves taking bio-oils and turning them into hydrogen and other oils.
In the past few years, a number of start-ups such as LiveFuels, Solazyme, and GreenFuel Technologies have come up with plans to turn algae into a basis for biodiesel or a synthetic form of petroleum. Some of the companies want to genetically manipulate the algae, while others will use natural strains of algae. GreenFuel, meanwhile, will put its algae-growing ponds near electric power plants so that the microorganisms can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and cut down greenhouse gases.
Chevron will work with start-ups too. The idea is that start-ups will incubate ideas and Chevron will try to commercialize the promising ones, said Don Paul, Chevron's retiring CTO, in a speech earlier this month. Start-ups will have a tough path if they want to commercialize fuel themselves. Building a full-fledged commercial-scale fuel plant takes about $3 billion and takes more than a decade, Paul noted. A prototype plant--a facility that can crank out 1,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket in the world's 85 million barrel a day diet--costs around $300 million
Algae is an incredibly oily microbe--some species are nearly 50 percent lipid. Algae also grows fast so a hectare can produce 15,000 to 80,000 liters of oil a year, far more than most other oily plants. It also has almost no other value, unlike corn.
So the catch? It's not easy to convert into fuel. Separating water from algae has been one of the big problems. It's not uncommon to have 1 gram of usable algae in every liter of water, according to John Sheehan, vice president of sustainability at LiveFuels. "That's 1,000 parts of water for every part of algae," he said in an interview earlier this year.
Cost is also a problem and it's unclear at this point when or if algae fuel will compete with fossil fuels. Sheehan knows of what he speaks. He oversaw some of the early algae fuel projects at NREL. A lot of the start-ups rely on research from the national labs.
If anything, fuel is clearly running out. We've used up about 1.1 trillion barrels of the traditional sources of oil on the planet, said Paul. By 2012, we will have used 1.5 trillion barrels and not everything down below can be extracted. Thus, there is an opportunity for alternatives.
Making fuel out of algae is one of those ideas that everyone loves. An acre of algae can produce 50 times more oil than an acre of soy, estimates John Sheehan, now vice president of strategy and sustainable development at LiveFuels.
"It can produce a lot of oil," he said in an interview on Wednesday.
The oil can be used to make biodiesel or synthetic forms of petroleum or both. Many hope that algae-based fuel can sell for around $40 to $50 a barrel, or a lot less than crude.
Algae facilities can also suck significant amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The fumes coming out of utility smokestacks can be piped into algae growing facilities. And to top it off, algae's not a massive food crop at the moment, so you aren't using a valuable food crop to gas cars.
Sheehan's not new to the field. He oversaw biomass, ethanol and algae programs at National Renewable Energy Labs. An NREL paper on algae--along with research from some of the national labs--forms the basis of a lot of the thinking around algae.
Right now, though, no one is producing it commercially. Companies such as LiveFuels, GreenFuel Technologies and Solazyme hope to start seeing algae oil get into the fuel markets in a substantial way over the next few years, but it's still mostly experimental. GreenFuel recently hit some snags and changed CEOs.
One challenge is removing the water. It's not uncommon to have 1 gram of usable algae in every liter of water. "That's 1,000 parts of water for every part of algae," he said.
The industry is also in the midst of a few religious wars. One is controlled versus open ponds. In controlled facilities, engineers can regulate the growth of organisms and control what kinds of species grow in the environment. These facilities cost quite a bit. Controlling the rate of growth can also be a problem.
"Open ponds are the cheapest, simplest solution," he said. "But it is much harder to maintain consistency."
Then there is the question of using biologically enhanced organisms or a mixture of naturally occurring species. Enhanced organisms can produce more oil per cell. However, they may not thrive if foreign species enter the pond.
LiveFuels is an open pond/multispecies company, by the way.
"The issue is: is it doable?" he said. "The question is: can we get the costs down to where it can compete" with fossil fuels?
Solazyme, which wants to turn algae into transportation fuel, has signed a contract to supply oils to Imperium Renewables, a growing biodiesel refiner.
Under the deal, Solazyme will deliver algae oil to Imperium, which will then turn it into biodiesel. Imperium makes biodiesel from a number of plant oils. Solazyme is currently only delivering "pilot scale" amounts of oil, said Solazyme president Jonathan Wolfson, but the production is real.
"We will be delivering agreed upon quantities to Imperium over 2007," he said. "In addition, we are producing algal oil today and have been for some time."
Biodiesel works in regular diesel cars, but it's made of plant or animal oil, which pollutes less than the regular, fossil fuel kind. Right now, biodiesel constitutes a percent of a percent of the world's diesel supply.
Algae, say advocates, is one greasy organism. The single-celled plants produce quite a bit of oil for their size. The North Sea oil fields, some assert, were not created from the bones of dead dinosaurs or palm trees. Instead, it is the prehistoric remnant of a massive algal bloom.
Algae grows rapidly, leading to more crops in a year, and can grow in sparsely populated and unused land in the desert. A hectare pond filled with algae can produce 15,000 to 80,000 liters of vegetable oil a year. Only about 6,000 liters of palm oil can be squeezed out of a hectare a year. Corn is only good for 120 liters per hectares of oil a year, said Tony Espiga, CFO of GreenFuel Technologies earlier this year.
GreenFuel plans to capture carbon dioxide from power plants and use the gas to grow algae in bioreactors, i.e. contained ponds. It's carbon sequestration and transportation fuel all in one. GreenFuel has a demo plant and hopes to open a full-fledged power plant in Arizona this year.
It's also not a major source of food for humans.
But here's the catch. No one is making algae fuel on a massive industrial scale at the moment. Separating the water from algae to leave just oil is also not easy, says Ron Stoltz, government relations manager for Sandia National Labs.
Sandia has performed some of the pioneering work on algae fuel and is working with several start-ups, including LiveFuels, and licensing its technology. LiveFuels has said it doesn't plan to sell algae fuel feedstock until around 2010.
Half Moon Bay, Calif--A number of companies have sketched out plans to convert algae into a feedstock for transportation fuel, but GreenFuel Technologies is farther along in bringing the concept to market than most.
And the Cambridge, Mass.-based company trotted out numbers at the Think Tomorrow Today conference sponsored by ThinkEquity Partners here (say that three times fast) to illuminate why the idea is getting so much attention.First off, algae grows rapidly and grows constantly, which means that algae ponds can produce more oil per hectare in a year than traditional plant crops, said GreenFuel CFO Guillermo Espiga.
A hectare pond filled with algae can produce 15,000 to 80,000 liters of vegetable oil a year. Only about 6,000 liters of palm oil can be squeezed out of a hectare a year. Corn is only good for 120 hectares of oil a year, Espiga said.
Algae can also be converted into a variety of materials, insulating producers from changes in commodity prices to some degree. It can be turned into alcohol for ethanol, biomass that can be burned in a furnace, or animal feed (which can also be sold under the Soylent Green brand name in grocery stores). A single hectare can generate 8,000 gallons of oil, 2,400 gallons of ethanol a year and 2.6 tons of glycerin, a material bought by the cosmetics industry, he said.
But there's more. GreenFuel plans to produce algae in ponds next to coal-fired power plants. The carbon dioxide from the plants is captured and provides the food for growing the algae. At a 100 megawatt coal-burning power plant, 100 acres of algae ponds, optimized with species that grow well in that particular environment, will consume 90 percent of the CO2 from the plant.
Thus, power plants that deploy the technology will generate revenue from carbon credits as well as make money from selling feedstocks. Espiga estimates that there are 1,750 power plants in the U.S. that sit next to spare real estate that could accommodate some of GreenFuel's algae ponds. The standard size of the algae facilities will be around 250 acres, he said.
So far, GreenFuel has only opened demonstration plant but expects to open a full fledged power plant in Arizona this year. By 2012, the company hopes to hit revenues of $100 million. It will license the technology as well as build its own power plant/algae facilities.
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