Solar-Powered Biofuel Primed for Primetime

What if we could capture something we want more of (i.e. solar power) and something we have too much of (ahem, carbon dioxide), and use one to make fuel out of the other? All this without eating up acres upon acres of agricultural land. Oh, and we’d be consuming CO2 emissions at the same time.

Joule Biotechnology says they have just the solution to achieve that – SolarFuel. However effective it may be, Joule is keeping their lips sealed on a third ingredient, an organism that processes the solar heat and carbon dioxide to produce fuel for cars.

Fuel that requires no grass, no algae, nothing that need be grown agriculturally.

The Boston-area company claims to be testing their product outside of the laboratory and hopes to have a pilot manufacturing facility online by next year. The facility would logically be placed near a big CO2 emitter, such as a coal plant. According to Joule, if they harness that carbon dioxide, it could produce over 20,000 gallons of SolarEthanol fuel per year per acre of solar converters.

According to the Boston Globe, these converters look somewhat like a solar panel. Except for brackish water and synthetic organisms – very secret synthetic organisms – inside that actually perform the clandestine magic which produces SolarFuel from only carbon dioxide and solar heat in a salty water soup.

Joule is not the first (or at least the only) group to come up with the idea of solar-powered fuel. Sun Catalytix, led by Daniel Nocera of MIT, came up with a solar fuel cell based on hydrogen gas that could also be used to power future travel. That formula is also very secretive and appears to be much further from commercial integration than Joule’s SolarFuel.

Posted on August 26th in Solar Products by Dan.