Joule Biotech - 10X the amount of ethanol/acre with no corn or biomass

interesting stuff - but what's in the secret sauce?...

Joule Biotechnologies recently unveiled Helioculture™, a process that uses microorganisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel fuel. Unlike algae and other biomass-based fuel production strategies, Helio-culture does not generate biomass, requires no agricultural feedstock, uses unpurified brackish water, and operates on any terrain including nonarable land, the company says. The process also reportedly produces fuels directly, with little or no post-production processing.

Helioculture far outproduces production methods based on distilling or fermenting crops, according to the company. Joule estimates that it can manufacture 20,000 gallons of ethanol or hydrocarbon fuel per acre—a factor of between eight and ten times higher than corn-derived ethanol or distillation from cellulosic feedstock.

http://www.genengnews.com/articles/chitem.aspx?aid=3124&nc=1

website...
http://joulebio.com/

Most biologic systems to produce liquid fuels (algae for example) are limited by the low concentration of CO2 in the air. While CO2 concentration is high by greenhouse standards, it is extremely low for making alternative fuels. This is often one of the most significant limiting factors.
Generally speaking, research into alternative liquid fuels is thought to be 10-20 years away from producing something that is a viable alternative for petroleum in the heavy transportation sector.

Ecologically-Smart Method

Joule's Helioculture technology avoids the depletion of precious natural resources, with no dependency on agricultural land, crops or fresh water. At the same time, an independently-conducted lifecycle analysis shows that, through our intake of waste CO2, we have the potential to reduce harmful carbon emissions on a large scale – up to 90% in some instances.

Unlimited Scale and Supply

Joule efficiently captures sunlight to produce energy in liquid form, enabling tremendous scale, storage and transport of energy without the power degradation that limits storage of electricity. This advantage, combined with our continuous production process and use of waste CO2 as a sole feedstock, creates the potential to deliver virtually unlimited quantities of fuel. We currently target commercial delivery of up to 25,000 gallons of ethanol and 15,000 gallons of diesel per acre per year at full-scale production. Furthermore, the modular design of our SolarConverter system makes it readily extensible from smaller industrial operations to large-scale commerical plants, minimizing scale-up risks.

Highly-Efficient Production

Avoiding the use of raw material feedstocks dramatically simplifies Joule's production process, while also removing a costly component that can be subject to significant fluctuations in price and availability. In addition, our process has the capability of achieving up to 10X more efficient land use versus biomass-derived fuels.

Highly-Competitive Pricing

Even the best technology and system will fail without stable production costs and competitive market pricing. The efficienices of Joule's production system, which requires fewer resources and less processing than both petroleum- and biomass-derived fuels, will allow Joule to meet or beat the pricing of existing transporation fuels. We expect to deliver ethanol and diesel at the energy equivalent of as little as $50 and $40 per barrel respectively.

http://www.joulebio.com/why-solar-fuel/overview

And then lets us re-use some of it a second time. This is conceptually no different than algal processes. The technology may be a little different, but it suffers from exactly the same problem: we have to produce CO2 in the first place.

Let me guess. They're proposing a pilot project using the exhaust gases from a fossil-fuelled power station as their feedstock. Once they have enough investor buy-in.

This is 2010's version of saying "dot-com".

Doesn't ethanol have reduced CO2 emissions compared to gasoline? Converting waste CO2 to ethanol should reduce green house gasses overall - right?

by not producing them in the first place. That approach seems less complicated to me, somehow. Though of course there's less opportunity to fleece venture capitalists.

That consumes C02 and sunlight through photosynthesis and farts ethanol and hydrocarbon gasses into the air.

Sounds like a potentially dangerous thing if it got loose into the environment.