U.S. company hopes to make fuel from sunlight, CO2

I did a quick search and didnt find anything regarding this story.

OK So now we can make oil in a matter of days or weeks instead of waiting for mother nature. I wonder how this would affect the global price of oil if it goes mainstream.

Stay tuned.

U.S. company hopes to make fuel from sunlight, CO2

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. start-up Joule Biotechnologies hopes to make commercial amounts of motor fuel by feeding engineered organisms high concentrations of carbon dioxide and sunlight, its top executive said. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company, which launched on Monday, hopes to make up to 20,000 gallons per acre of fuel a year by late 2011 or early 2012 at prices competitive with $50 oil.

It concentrates sunlight in a solar converter, directing it and carbon dioxide to engineered organisms to make fuel similar to ethanol. "This is the first solar company that is producing liquid fuel as opposed to electrons," said Joule President and CEO Bill Sims. He said Joule is different from companies that make biofuels from plants because its process does not need a lot of land to grow food and energy crops like corn or switchgrass.

"In recent news, Joule Bio. has been wiped off the map by the SARS Virus."


-More to come at 10:00

Thats very interesting, I hope everything works out well. Its good to see companies going out and trying new things like this.

On the other hand if this engineered organism got out of the containment area then it could have very harmful effects for the environment. If all they need is sunlight and CO2 then they could take over quickly... and since they poo fuel it would kill off any thing else...

Oh don't know, just my 2 cents...

I saw something similar to this...A new company was using algae to clean waste water and a bi product was an ethanol like fuel. Plus they did it out in the middle of the desert so it shouldn't have too much of an environmental impact if it DID have some kind of accident.

Good find man

Any news about an alternative to fossil fuels is good news to me. Im not sure if big oil will stand by and let them get in the way of record profits, but we shall see.

Years ago a company developed a bug to break down oil spills.

Ask anyone that stores diesel in tanks like farmers and commercial boaters/fisherman

This bug just loves diesel fuel and is a pain in the **s

www.yanmarhelp.com...

Give it 20 years and this fuel from sunlight process most likely will be a bust because of some BUG getting into the system and causing so much damage to the fuel plants that its no longer profitable to make fuel this way.

A bug could be made by hostile foreign country to kill this type fuel production plants as a bio-war agent.