Gas 2.0

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good documentary can change your vocabulary.

Josh Tickell’s new film, Fields of Fuel, has just won the Audience Award for Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which opened last Monday to a standing ovation, is a sharp, compelling look at biofuels and the history of America’s dependence on foreign oil. From home-made biodiesel to OPEC corruption, it covers the myriad reasons why we should be changing our fuel to change our lives.

Tickell, the man who essentially introduced the world to biodiesel, has brought us an outstanding contribution to the discourse on biofuels: Fields of Fuel says in ninety minutes what we’ve all been trying to sum up for years. Here’s the trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I was interviewed by Timber Talk, a forestry radio station in Arkansas, which coincidentally took place at the North American International Auto show in Detroit, Michigan. Timber Talk approached me last fall after reading a post on VegTruck.com that dealt with using straight vegetable oil as a fuel source.

Fun fact: Timber Talk radio covers a population of 2,400,000 in three states.

We spoke for about 30 minutes on a range of topics, including the new renewable fuel standard, cellulosic ethanol and GM’s announcement, algae biodiesel, vegetable oil as a fuel, and so on.

Listen to the show here.

Photo Credit

It’s been a big week for biofuel breakthroughs and new partnerships. While photographing the algae biodiesel cars outside Fields of Fuel yesterday, insiders I spoke with alluded to big news: I just learned that Chevron will be backing Solazyme to produce algae biodiesel (East Bay Business Times):

Chevron Corp. is accelerating its research into biofuel derived from algae. On Tuesday, Solazyme Inc. of South San Francisco announced an agreement with the Chevron subsidiary Chevron Technology Ventures to develop and test biodiesel feedstock made from algae.

The partnership will almost certainly rev up Solazyme’s production and research process, as will GM’s backing of Coskata ethanol. But I still have no information on how the algae will be grown. I’m getting the sense that this is almost cellulosic + algae = biodiesel, since these guys are talking about getting sugar from corn stover, switchgrass, wood chips, and sugarcane, then feeding it to algae to boost production. Take a look at this video from the film: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at the Auto Show, I had the opportunity to be interviewed for a few short online video segments by coBRANDiT. My interview made it into a few different clips, including the Coskata biofuel announcement. Take a look at the following videos:

Download Coskata Announcement

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Kelly of NextGear was kind enough to pass along video of our breakfast with Rick Wagoner, Chairman and CEO of General Motors, which took place last week at the NAIAS.

Mr. Wagoner addressed a variety of issues, including the Coskata ethanol announcement, the future of the Hummer brand (hint: smaller), the risks associated with producing the Chevy Volt, and the impotency of CAFE standards. In case you wanted to hear it straight from the top, here you go:

Download Breakfast with Rick Wagoner

I’m here in a bitterly cold Park City, Utah, for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Current temperature outside is 5, and the night before last registered at a polar -10 degrees F.

But hey, I’m at Sundance.

For the next ten days I’ll be on the lookout for films and panels pertaining to biofuels or the planet. It looks like Josh Tickell, the well-known author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank (who’s primarily responsible for the biodiesel homebrew movement in the last decade) has a film this year. It’s called Fields of Fuel.

I’ll also be collaborating with a colleague here to finish a short documentary we filmed last year called Veggie Truck. If it isn’t totally embarrassing (I haven’t watched the footage in almost a year) I’ll be posting it here.

Until then, I’ll be watching movies and fighting off frostbite.

Run your car on compressed air? Drivers in Europe may be doing just that by the end of the year, according to a report from the BBC…

Like to know more about the air car? Here’s their website.

All that green pond scum I used to avoid could well produce enough fuel to satisfy all the energy needs in the United States. That’s a pretty far out statement, but Glen Kertz, CEO of Valcent Products made it very clear that a process of growing algae vertically is capable of producing huge amounts of alternative fuels. It’s being proven today in Texas.

This is one fascinating story, with a link below showing the process and an explanation by Mr. Kertz.

Valcent has partnered with Global Green Solutions to develop a production test project in El Paso, TX. After 90 days of continual production, algae was being harvested at an average of one gram per liter from the Vertigro Bio-Reactor System. Based on those results, the joint venture partners believe their system would deliver about 33,000 gallons of algae oil per acre per year. By comparison, soybean oil produces about 49 gallons of oil per acre each year, and palm oil would yield about 630 acres of oil a year. Read the rest of this entry »