Joule patents renewable diesel process (Boston)
Joule Unlimited Inc. announced Tuesday that it has received a U.S. patent for its highly-engineered microorganisms, which the company says could be used to produce a new type of renewable diesel fuel.
The Cambridge-based firm said the patent award represented a key milestone in the company’s bid to create renewable fuels without the need for intermediates such as sugar, algal or agricultural biomass.
Joule says its microorganisms function as biocatalysts that use sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to produce liquid hydrocarbons that are fungible with conventional diesel fuel.
Bill Sims, president and CEO of Joule, said in the announcement that the patent "validates the truly revolutionary nature of our process, which has the potential to yield infrastructure-compatible replacements for fossil fuels at meaningful scale and highly-competitive costs, even before subsidies."
Joule has dubbed its process "helioculture," which centers on solar converter systems that can be set up in rows on any type of open land, including non-agricultural land.
With its process, Joule says, renewable diesel fuel could be produced at a cost of $30 a barrel, at a large scale, virtually anywhere in world. The company says it’s on track to have its diesel commercially available by 2012, and it could also produce ethanol and chemicals using the same process.
One acre of solar converter systems could produce 15,000 gallons of diesel per year, or 25,000 gallons of ethanol – higher than the output of corn-based ethanol, according to Joule.
Sims said previously that the technology could decentralize the fuel industry, allowing any region with access to land, sun, CO2 and water to produce its own fuel. The process is also environmentally friendly, he said, because the process can use non-fresh water along with waste carbon dioxide from power plants or other industrial facilities.
Sims said Joule’s pilot plant in Leander, Texas, should soon be up and running for producing ethanol. Diesel production will be added by the end of the year, he said.
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