[M II A II R II K]

Harnessing Sunlight to Convert Carbon Dioxide to Liquid Fuel


April 21, 2010

by John Messina

Read More: http://www.physorg.com/news191076348.html

This eco-friendly system requires no agricultural land or fresh water and is capable of producing more than 20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually. Bill Sims, president and CEO of Joule Biotechnologies stated: “There is no question that viable, renewable fuels are vitally important, both for economic and environmental reasons. And while many novel approaches have been explored, none has been able to clear the roadblocks caused by high production costs, environmental burden and lack of real scale”.

Bill Sims went on to say; “Joule was created for the very purpose of eliminating these roadblocks with the best equation of biotechnology, engineering, scalability and pricing to finally make renewable fuel a reality—all while helping the environment by reducing global CO2 emissions.”

By leveraging highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and CO2, usable liquid fuels and chemicals can be manufactured. This “SolarConverter” system assist the process capturing the sunlight to product conversion and separation using minimal resources. This diverts from established processes of biomass derived biofuels such as algae and cellulose-based forms which are costly, involves many processing steps and substantial scale-up risk.