By Adam Rabiner
No one can accuse Hot Grease, a 2017 documentary about the biodiesel industry, of food porn. It’s the opposite. Rather than saliva-inducing chefs’ creations adoringly videoed, the viewer is treated to scenes of tanks filled with dark and viscous spent kitchen grease. One can only be relieved that the “scratch and sniff” movie craze peaked in the 1970s. As Donnie Tipton, owner of Going Green Grease Recycling, one of several entrepreneurs featured in the film, observes, “Aside from donut shops, I’ve never opened one where I was like, ahhh that smells good.”
In fact, restaurants, which annually dispose of 250 million gallons of used cooking oil, do their best to mask and cover this unseemly side of the business. And people don’t give much thought about where the oil that cooked up their French Fries ends up. As a result, not much light is shed on the grease industry and its shadowy markets. A segment of the film depicts, as an example, a thriving Wild West of used-cooking-oil theft worth $75 million a year.
The theft exists because it can be easily converted to bio-diesel fuel through a multi-step but simple process described by Jim Eberle, another featured entrepreneur and owner of Eberle Biodiesel. While 75% of the biodiesel in the United States is manufactured by ten major refineries, there are also dozens of local “garage” refineries that operate on a smaller scale. Eberle, struggles with the fluctuating price of bio-diesel, as do the other featured business people, but continues to experiment and seek new markets. Despite lacking a college degree, he recognizes that a commercial protective wood finish contains conventional petroleum-based ingredients and invents and hopes to distribute a cleaner alternative.
Another featured entrepreneur is 32 year old Justin Heller, a native New Yorker with a passion for protecting the environment who settled in Houston after college to found Root Fuel, a 100% bio-diesel gas station. Heller’s timing was not great and his venture failed due to low fuel prices which rise and fall in tandem with gasoline. Fortunately, Heller was able to land a job as the feedstock buyer in the corporate office of Neste, the Finnish National Oil company, which made a 2006 investment in renewables which now make up more than half its revenues. He’s happy to be part of the solution not the problem and while it’s not where he had planned to be (he had opined earlier that despite the hardships, running a gas station still beat sitting in a cubicle) it’s not so bad wearing khakis after all.
The final and by far the biggest entrepreneur featured in Hot Grease is Gene Gebolys, founder and CEO of World Energy, one of America’s largest manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of biodiesel. Gebolys spends much of his time, along with several members of the National Biodiesel Board, “telling the story every day” to various senators and congressmen, in the hope of influencing federal public policy that is friendly to the renewables industry (and much opposed by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbyists for the oil companies).
Hot Grease handles the business and political, the micro and macro, threads very well. First aired on the Discovery Channel, this film is a real discovery, casting light on shadows and revealing a fascinating, if greasy business. The film makers will be available in person at the Q & A following the screening so come prepared to ask questions and learn how the biodiesel industry is currently faring.
No one can accuse Hot Grease, a 2017 documentary about the biodiesel industry, of food porn. It’s the opposite. Rather than saliva-inducing chefs’ creations adoringly videoed, the viewer is treated to scenes of tanks filled with dark and viscous spent kitchen grease. One can only be relieved that the “scratch and sniff” movie craze peaked in the 1970s. As Donnie Tipton, owner of Going Green Grease Recycling, one of several entrepreneurs featured in the film, observes, “Aside from donut shops, I’ve never opened one where I was like, ahhh that smells good.”
In fact, restaurants, which annually dispose of 250 million gallons of used cooking oil, do their best to mask and cover this unseemly side of the business. And people don’t give much thought about where the oil that cooked up their French Fries ends up. As a result, not much light is shed on the grease industry and its shadowy markets. A segment of the film depicts, as an example, a thriving Wild West of used-cooking-oil theft worth $75 million a year.
The theft exists because it can be easily converted to bio-diesel fuel through a multi-step but simple process described by Jim Eberle, another featured entrepreneur and owner of Eberle Biodiesel. While 75% of the biodiesel in the United States is manufactured by ten major refineries, there are also dozens of local “garage” refineries that operate on a smaller scale. Eberle, struggles with the fluctuating price of bio-diesel, as do the other featured business people, but continues to experiment and seek new markets. Despite lacking a college degree, he recognizes that a commercial protective wood finish contains conventional petroleum-based ingredients and invents and hopes to distribute a cleaner alternative.
Another featured entrepreneur is 32 year old Justin Heller, a native New Yorker with a passion for protecting the environment who settled in Houston after college to found Root Fuel, a 100% bio-diesel gas station. Heller’s timing was not great and his venture failed due to low fuel prices which rise and fall in tandem with gasoline. Fortunately, Heller was able to land a job as the feedstock buyer in the corporate office of Neste, the Finnish National Oil company, which made a 2006 investment in renewables which now make up more than half its revenues. He’s happy to be part of the solution not the problem and while it’s not where he had planned to be (he had opined earlier that despite the hardships, running a gas station still beat sitting in a cubicle) it’s not so bad wearing khakis after all.
The final and by far the biggest entrepreneur featured in Hot Grease is Gene Gebolys, founder and CEO of World Energy, one of America’s largest manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of biodiesel. Gebolys spends much of his time, along with several members of the National Biodiesel Board, “telling the story every day” to various senators and congressmen, in the hope of influencing federal public policy that is friendly to the renewables industry (and much opposed by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbyists for the oil companies).
Hot Grease handles the business and political, the micro and macro, threads very well. First aired on the Discovery Channel, this film is a real discovery, casting light on shadows and revealing a fascinating, if greasy business. The film makers will be available in person at the Q & A following the screening so come prepared to ask questions and learn how the biodiesel industry is currently faring.