1 NZ may be a small country, but in the wider world, what we do, use and consume affects lives everywhere. So I'm on a mission to see how we're treating our backyards, both here and further afield. What are we doing to be cleaner and greener? What do we need to change, and what does the future hold? So join me, Te Radar, as I go global. Don't worry ` I'll plant plenty of trees to offset the travel. Now, where's my passport? Captions by Faith Hamblyn. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013 It's a well known story, and it goes like this. Up through the ground came a bubbling crude, black gold, Texas tea, and life as we know it was never the same again. It was true for the Beverly Hillbillies, and it's true for the rest of us, in a world that would barely cope without oil. ENGINE SPUTTERS Bugger. 'I suspect that not all of us appreciate just what goes into making fuel. 'Luckily, when it comes to oil, most of the work has already been done.' Oil isn't a complex thing to make naturally. Simply start with some plants and animals that lived in or around ancient seas. Trap them under layers of sand and mud, apply pressure, remove all of the oxygen and, hey, presto, you have oil. The only catch is that it takes a couple of hundred million years. The hard part is getting it out of the ground and refining it into its many forms, such as petrol, plastic, cosmetics or even fabric. Should we run out, then life without oil means life without many of the things we've become accustomed to. And what would we do then? ELECTRONIC MUSIC 'With only a limited amount of oil left, we're looking for alternatives to fuel our future. 'And when it comes to fuel, it may be that we can't see the wood for the trees. 'Humans have been harnessing the energy of wood since cavemen created campfires, 'which is why I'm lumbering about in the forest somewhere near Rotorua 'in order to witness the majesty of the Waratah.' It's a nice day. Look at that. Here we are in the bush, men on machines felling plantation forest. 'The Waratah is capable of chopping down and stripping trees with the greatest of ease. 'And the best thing about it ` it's local technology.' And that's made in Tokoroa? And that's made in Tokoroa? Made in Tokoroa, NZ-built, sold all over the world. Right. So long gone are the days of a guy standing there with a chainsaw and felling a tree down. TREE CRACKS ARCHIVE: Yahoo! Definitely. It's the way of the future all right. They must be hard to drive. They must be hard to drive. Yeah, it takes a while to get skilled in that. This is, um, significantly more high-tech than the diggers I was brought up in. This has got two pedals and two joysticks, each of which has got 18 buttons on it. It's got a computer, so I guess you can use that to update your Facebook status. 'About to chop down a tree.' 15 seconds later ` 'Chopped down a tree.' The biggest single change from the early days of milling in the bush is not the men, but the machines and the equipment they handle ` the tractors, the haulers, the big lorries, which have taken the place of the horses, the bullocks and the trams of 30 years ago. 'Today's logging gangs can fell over 1000 trees an hour. 'The real difference is what happens to the timber that used to be considered waste and was 'simply left in the forest to rot. I'm meeting Shane, who refuses to let this waste timber go,...' Hi, Shane. '...well, to waste.' Gidday, Radar. Gidday, Radar. How you doing? Gidday, Radar. How you doing? Good. How are you? I'm good. Here we are, assembling in the field in front of what appears to be a lot of logs. A lot of move to use this stuff as biofuel, biomass? Yeah, it's happening. It's definitely happening. And it's happening at the cheapest source, and as we go further and that demand gets greater, we'll start to look at using a lot more of our forest residues for that too. So the logging contactor has made his logs, and this is the waste left behind. And I come in behind all the logging crews and generate, um, as much value as I can out of it. How much would be left behind? How much would be left behind? Anywhere from, sort of, 10%-15% can be left. That's a lot of wood. That's a lot of wood. Yeah. 'And it's not just unwanted branches and bark that Shane makes use of ` 'here at Red Stag Sawmill, he has an eye for the offcuts.' You can see a defect, and, uh, what we do is we take it and say, 'OK, well, we can actually cut a piece of clear shook out of that.' Essentially you're looking for a usable length where there's no defects. Pretty much, yeah. And it gets put through at Red Stag as a remanufacturing plant. Yeah. Finger joints are back together. You often see it. I've bought, you know, those lengths of timber finger-jointed and never thought about where they're from. Exactly. Well, this is where they come from. There's a lot of value already been put into a piece of timber by the time it gets to here. The log's been purchased and been gauged; it's been kiln-dried. Out of any waste stream, there is a certain amount of, uh, truly, you know, good-value product you can pull. 'Tim from Red Stag is also fired up about using waste wisely. 'The sawmill's boiler burns waste wood and shavings to generate its own electricity.' How much energy comes out of timber? How much energy comes out of timber? A lot. If I had a bit of timber this long, bit of four-by-two, we're talking about a energy equivalent of eight hours of a one-bar heater. And we can produce up to 3.5 megawatts of energy ` enough energy to support about 7000 domestic houses. Using waste wood for energy is just a no-brainer. We produce waste wood ` we've gotta do something with it. At the moment, the most cost-effective option is to burn it for energy ` uh, maybe in the future we may be able to produce biofuels from it. If you looked at a equivalent site burning fossil fuels, their carbon footprint would be probably 40 times greater than what it is here. So I guess that wouldn't even... You know, then you've gotta ship all that fuel in as well; you've gotta dig it up out of the ground. And we've still got to dispose of our waste wood, which would be an enormous cost if we didn't burn it. So some day in futureland, the thousands of logs we export could be replacing the energy we currently import in the form of oil. And to prove it I'm moving from the backwoods to a backwater, because in Louisiana they're experimenting with gasifying biomass, which simply means turning waste wood into gas to power all manner of things. This is the America's energy state, a top producer of crude oil and natural gas. Doesn't get much better than this, if only it weren't for the alligators and the mosquitoes and the snakes. Think I'll pass on a swim. Instead I'll conserve energy by snoozing in my shanty boat, because tomorrow I'm looking at a use for alligators other than scaring tourists. 1 'Welcome to Lafayette. Here the University of Louisiana is investigating alternatives to oil. 'While some of the scientists experiment with converting woodchips to gas as a potential power source, 'across the campus, Professor Rakesh is looking at quite a different fuel source.' Hello, Professor. Hello, Professor. How are you? Hello, Professor. How are you? Very good, thank you. Not many, uh, campuses have an alligator pond. (LAUGHS) Not many, uh, campuses have an alligator pond. (LAUGHS) Not many! Not many. Alligators are farmed for skin and meat, but Professor Rakesh's Gatorade is a biofuel based on the fat that is usually thrown away. So where better for us to chat about biofuel than on the bayou with veteran swampy Tucker? In the United States, we produce only about 30% of our oil. Our reserves are even less, and our reserves will last only 10 years. It's a big issue. What do we do? Is the key to sustainable fuel production for areas to look around their local vicinity to see what it is that they've got that they could use? It might be alligator fat or waste pine trees, local refineries using local materials. BOAT ENGINE REVS GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC What is the typical size of a big alligator? Farm-raised, about 7ft or 8ft. About 150 pounds. Farm-raised, about 7ft or 8ft. About 150 pounds. 150 pounds. So even if they have about 15% fat, they'll be 22 pounds of fat. That's a lot of fat. That's a lot of fat. On the alligator. Yeah. Yeah. So that fat needs to be processed. Oh, you can hear this, huh? Is that an alligator? Is that an alligator? Bullfrog. Oh, it's a bullfrog. (LAUGHS) Oh, it's a bullfrog. (LAUGHS) It's a bullfrog. > Oh, it's a bullfrog. (LAUGHS) It's a bullfrog. > ALL LAUGH They're not dangerous, are they? They're not dangerous, are they? Nah. They're good to eat, though. Are they really? Are they really? Yeah. In Cajun country, if it moves, we eat it. ALL LAUGH Or, in the future, if it moves, you might be able to use it to power your boat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about the idea of alligator fuel? If it's a by-product and it's going to waste now, yeah, why not? They used to use it as, uh, candle oil at one time. So no different to whales and seal oil, and we used to juice, um, penguins. But I guess the difference is that penguins are a little bit more attractive than an alligator. Well... Well... Is that a matter of opinion? You can use more alligator in captivity than you could penguins in captivity. (CHUCKLES) Be safer to produce penguins, though, wouldn't it? Alligators are a bit bitey. 'And there's another environmental upside.' It got so alligators were nearly extinct. The alligator population comeback is mainly due to the Wildlife and Fisheries egg programme. In the wild, only 10% of babies that hatch will survive. The owls and the crows are their worst predators. They come from above, and they'll grab a baby alligator and leave with it. And then there's otter and mink and, uh, raccoon. But in captivity, they get almost 100% survival rate after they hatch. The alligator farms would buy eggs from trappers, and they release, uh, a certain percentage of them back into the wild after they're a year old, which gives them a much, much higher survival rate than in the wild. And that's how the, uh, population of alligators grew so fast. BOAT ENGINE REVS It's time to head back to the lab, so it's 'See you later, alligator' and, 'Hello, algae.' Lipids are the bread and butter of the biodiesel industry. Doesn't matter where they came from. They can come from alligator fat, they can come from the microorganisms, they can come from vegetable oils ` why not algae? So we think that algae is the final answer, maybe in the distant future, but I sincerely believe that that's where our future lies. The beakers you've got bubbling away in a lab down there ` they contain the breakthrough that will power things? That will contain the power of our future to come. PLANE ENGINE DRONES 'When things get scarce, one option is to go without, 'which is why I'm off to Silver City, New Mexico to visit writer and goatherder Doug Fine. 'Doug decided to try living for a year without petroleum. 'And if you think that sounds tough, try doing it in the desert.' Hi, Doug. Hi, Doug. Hey. Hi, Doug. Hey. Fancy seeing you here. Welcome. (LAUGHS) Welcome. (LAUGHS) Who would've thought I would have ended up in sunny New Mexico? I'm glad you did. Let's start this way. I'm glad you did. Let's start this way. Shall we go and milk a goat? Have you milked a goat? Have you milked a goat? Yes, I have milked a goat, although not by hand. Let me get it going. Once it starts flowing, I'm sure you'll know it. Did you imagine you'd end up here in New Mexico milking a goat? Everybody else is more surprised than I am that I ended up here. You're on it. I hear milk coming out. I hear milk coming out. That's definitely milk. I'm tempted to take a little bit straight from the source, actually. I'm tempted to take a little bit straight from the source, actually. You should. All the goats are named for singers that I like, but whose voices kind of sound goat-like, so this is Nico for the Velvet Underground singer, who I think the human actually might be part goat. That is delicious. Good work, goat. Thanks, Nico. We appreciate it. > Thanks, Nico. We appreciate it. > < Yeah, Nico. Not only a fine voice, but a wonderful udder. COUNTRY MUSIC One of the hardest things to ditch as a farmer is, of course, fuel. Doug hasn't gone back to the horse and cart ` instead he has reengineered his massive truck to run on straight cooking oil. TRUCK ENGINE REVS The locals give me that finger wave on their steering wheel, cos I look like just another rancher, but after having gone past, they smell the vegetable-oil exhaust and they think, 'There's something liberal about this guy. We don't know what. 'The truck looks good, but it doesn't smell right.' Then I'm rooting for unhealthy American dietary trends, cos I drive on kung pao chicken grease. So, you're driving on two different tanks. In cold weather I start up on a normal diesel or biodiesel tank. I have a control panel and when it reaches a certain temperature, it will convert over to the second fuel tank, which is 80 gallons of just restaurant grease, filtered. Colonel's secret herbs and spices are filtered out. The fellow who did this conversion on the vehicle, a two-tour Iraq veteran, said he had an epiphany as his chopper was fired on in Iraq that the whole raison d'etre for the wars might be eliminated if you just cut the petroleum out of the equation. So there's 5 gallons. That'll keep me going 100 miles. You did a year living without petroleum. How did that work? Well. Driving on vegetable oil instead of petroleum ` it's great. Solar power for almost all the electricity of the house, solar power for the water pump, drip irrigation in the garden, goat's milk and milk products for the protein ` all that is great, but you discover as you do it more is you always have further to go and there's hidden petroleum in things. I want to have algae produced in the duck pond associated with the greenhouse and basically fill her up ` fill the truck up ` with algae, um, or some biofuel, you know, and wean yourself from the refinery. That'd be super nice. It strikes me that there is so much more here to think about than I ever had to worry. You know, I'd worry if the goat got into my crop and ate some tomatoes, but here, what have you got? Well, the main thing we've got is coyotes, one I named Dick Cheney, because of his surveillance of the ranch. He basically cased out the place and wiped out the chicken coop. Now, I can't bear any anger towards the canine Dick Cheney, cos he's doing what I ask of myself and others, which is he's walking to work, you know, he's eating locally. And he's eating organically. And he's eating organically. Exactly. Right? And he's eating organically. Exactly. Right? BOTH LAUGH Given what I've seen here in the gas-guzzling USA, we're still some way down the track from a sustainable biofuelled future. But when you consider that it's really only around 100 years since people were travelling these very roads in wagons dragged by stubborn mule and flatulent oxen, who knows what we'll be using a hundred years from now? Whatever it may be, I'm not entirely sure it's gonna be good news for the alligators. Massey University is NZ's answer to Lafayette, at least when it comes to fuel research. Professor Yusuf is studying both algae and ways to extract hydrogen gas from waste water. How are you? How are you? Hello, Professor. What's going on there? We are using a photosynthetic bacterium to produce hydrogen from organic waste water. So you can see these bubbles of hydrogen rising. We just want to see how much hydrogen we can produce from how much waste; at what rate can we produce it. Hydrogen is a potential fuel. You could burn it in modified variants of a car engine if you like. It's always sort of invigorating to think that, you know, some huge breakthrough can come from as something as simple as a converted fish tank with some flagons of bacteria and some tinfoil and some pipes. When I look at things like this happening, it makes me quite excited to be a human, if you know what I mean. if you know what I mean. Yes, that we are able enforce nature in ways that... Yes. There's all these clever people trying to figure stuff out. It makes me feel that I don't do very much with my day. (LAUGHS) It makes me feel that I don't do very much with my day. (LAUGHS) OK. > That could be the start of the future right there. Possibly. Yeah. Possibly. Yeah. It sort of gives you goosebumps. 'He's also experimenting with ways to farm this green gold 'in an efficient, affordable and large-scale manner.' We are trying to understand the production process, and to reduce the costs of production, how to reduce the cost of the biomass, how to reduce the costs of separating the cells ` algae cells ` from the water, how to reduce the cost of extracting the oil from the cells so that, uh, fuels from algae, um, someday become economically competitive with petroleum drive. And will there be a day where I'll drive home in my algae-fuelled car and just hook it up to an algae-growing system or a plant in my own house? I don't think that's likely. What will happen is algae will be grown somewhere. There'll be process and some kind of a refinery, and you'll still have to go to your filling station to fill up your car. I won't have my own processing plant. No. You won't see the difference in how you get your fuel. The sort of things that will become a reality in NZ are that there will be carless days. There'll be days when it's just not possible to buy petrol. Uh, we don't want that. No, we don't. Which is why it's good news that there's a chap up north already producing a future fuel in his garage. Andreas is using waste fruit and sunshine to juice up his car. GENTLE MUSIC Hello, Andreas. Hello, Andreas. Oh, hello, Radar. Hello, Andreas. Oh, hello, Radar. How are you? Good. Good. You're very busy at the still. Good. You're very busy at the still. Yes. What have we got bubbling in there? What have we got bubbling in there? We've got about 40 litres of fermented kiwi, producing ethanol. What are we doing now ` sealing it up? Yes. Yes. It looks suspiciously like dough. Yes. It looks suspiciously like dough. It is dough. S'pose it doesn't turn into a useful form of bread at the end of it. S'pose it doesn't turn into a useful form of bread at the end of it. Oh, we could eat it. I could make a dough-based pun ` using dough to save dough. I'm not gonna to do that. It's not my style. < It doesn't seem a sophisticated technology. It's an old hot-water boiler. You cut them in half and it's ready to use. Oh, it's already coming. < And so we've got a bit of that. < What do you do with it then? I mean, you're not gonna be giving it away for Christmas. Uh, we could do that. < What a beautiful flame! Look at the colour. That's a good sign? That's a good sign ` that means the concentration is fine. It comes out about 60%-70%. We concentrate it up now at least 92% of ethanol, and that way we can run it into the petrol tank. Now we are running gas to heat it, and I don't like that. That's why I came up with the solar distil. That's my first prototype of a solar system. We can produce about 20 litres a day with that unit, but we're going about five times the size, so we make at least 100 litres of ethanol a day. What would the end goal with something like this be? What would the end goal with something like this be? That each farmer has got access to, uh, a distil, where he can run his own fuel out of his own produce, grown on his own farm, so it means he's completely independent, not spending any energy, not wasting any fuel, and you don't rely on overseas import of oil or whatever. What else could we use? What else could we use? Old rotten potatoes, old rotten kumara, sugar cane, ground poop ` you could use all sorts of organic material which has a sugar content. At the end I want to use grass clippings. And the great thing about that is, I suppose, that we don't have to wait for 200 million years to create a new fuel source. You know? You know? Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's all growing now. It's a perfect recycle, because the waste, after we've distilled, it's not going to waste. It's a natural fertiliser, so we actually just closing a cycle within our own farm. We complete in our own ecosystem, really. You could say you're almost creating a perpetual-motion machine of fuel ` the Holy Grail. Yes. Yes. Once that's all done, you have a celebratory drink of... Once that's all done, you have a celebratory drink of... It's for sure. That's for sure. What kind? Kiwifruit ethanol? What kind? Kiwifruit ethanol? No, persimmon in this case. Persimmon. Persimmon. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite a nice lifestyle. Living the dream. Alcohol and driving don't normally mix, but in this case, it's the perfect cocktail. If seems to run very well. You hardly feel a difference if it's ethanol or petrol. So what are we running on now? So what are we running on now? 50/50 ` ethanol/petrol. Right. So you can run cars, tractors, chainsaws? Any engine which runs on fuel can be converted in running on ethanol. Easy. And newer cars up to '99, you can go to 85 ethanol and 15 petrol. And in US cars, you can go 100%. 100% ethanol. 100% ethanol. Yes. Will there come a time, do you think, that NZ could become, I mean, entirely self-sufficient in fuel? Definitely. We have that much land mass. It's so easy ` everything grows. Here we are, poodling around half-fuelled by some leftover kiwifruit. Exactly. Rotten kiwifruit. I spend a lot of time looking at oil refineries, because I find them befuddling complex. The process of taking oil and turning it into petrol ` frankly, it's beyond me. And yet Andreas' process is so unfeasibly simple ` take fruit, rot fruit, boil fruit, capture juice, run car. And it strikes me that somewhere along the way, someone has been literally taking us for a ride. It makes me think ` why aren't more people doing it? We all have spare fruit. You probably have a lot of fruit where you've gone, 'Oh, that's a bit past it. What am I gonna do with that? 'I can either feed it to the chickens or the pigs or I can put it in my special fuel reserve. 'All I need is a still. And how dangerous can that be?' And isn't it great that in NZ it is still legal to operate a still? That makes me inordinately proud to be a NZer. Either that or somewhere along the way our government said, 'I don't care. 'If you wanna operate a still, be it on your head.' Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013 Tune in next week for the good oil on the hidden potential of two weeds ` one can feed us and clean up our water; the other one can be used to build houses, roads, bulletproof suits and even makes a tasty pizza.