Carbon dioxide and sunlight make fuel


A huge breakthrough
Ah, this is one of those free market stories I absolutely love passing along.

Start-up Joule Biotechnologies is sort of a mashup of the fuels, solar, and biotechnology industries.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company on Monday is disclosing its technology and business plans for making ethanol and other liquid fuels from genetically manipulated microorganisms that have been fed only sunlight and carbon dioxide.

In a break with biofuels companies, Joule says its HelioCulture system works without a biomass feedstock, such as algae or others plants. Instead, the company's engineered organisms grow through photosynthesis in a brackish water solution and directly excrete fuel or commercial chemicals.

Just so we're clear, this will do absolutely nothing to reduce carbon emissions. But considering that there is absolutely no evidence that human activity is causing global warming, that is okay. (And I still say that if you think humans put too much carbon in the atmosphere, PLANT MORE TREES!)

What it could do is make ethanol incredibly cheap and be able to produce it anywhere the sun shines.

Please notice I said "could," not will.

The savings on distribution costs alone would be enormous. Ethanol doesn't travel well in pipelines. But if you could decentralize production into a mass of mini-plants instead of one huge refinery, that problem is solved.

I'm also curious about secondary applications, maybe combined with those petroleum eating bacteria from a few years back. Could this technology be extended to "harvest" materials from old electronics and other discarded waste? BAM! Cheapo recycling, which would deal with the landfill problem.

Watch this one, it's exciting.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - July 27, 2009 at 12:29 PM  Tag


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