Fuel for the future: Joule Biotechnologies' genetically engineered microörganisms can turn sunlight into ethanol or diesel. Credit: Bob O'Connor
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Noubar Afeyan
(Joule Biotechnologies) Solar fuels are produced directly by photosynthetic microbes fed carbon dioxide
OTHERS WORKING ON SOLAR FUELS
Synthetic Genomics, La Jolla, CA
BioCee, Minneapolis, MN
University of Minnesota BioTechnology Institute, St. Paul, MN
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This article is part of an annual list of what we believe are the 10 most important emerging technologies. See the full list here.
When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass--corn or switchgrass or algae? "What we wanted to know," Afeyan says, "is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?"
The answer seems to be yes, according to Joule Biotechnologies, the company that Afeyan founded (also in Cambridge) to design this new fuel. By manipulating and designing genes, Joule has created photosynthetic microörganisms that use sunlight to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel--the first time this has ever been done, the company says. Joule grows the microbes in photobioreactors that need no fresh water and occupy only a fraction of the land needed for biomass-based approaches. The creatures secrete fuel continuously, so it's easy to collect. Lab tests and small trials lead Afeyan to estimate that the process will yield 100 times as much fuel per hectare as fermenting corn to produce ethanol, and 10 times as much as making it from sources such as agricultural waste. He says costs could be competitive with those of fossil fuels.
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If Afeyan is right, biofuels could become an alternative to petroleum on a much broader scale than has ever seemed possible. The supply of conventional biofuels, such as those made from corn, is constrained by the vast amount of water and agricultural land needed to grow the plants they're made from. And while advanced biofuels require less water and don't need high-quality land, their potential is limited by the expensive, multistep processes needed to make them. As a result, the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2050, biodiesel and ethanol will meet only 26 percent of world demand for transportation fuel.
Joule's bioengineers have equipped their microörganisms with a genetic switch that limits growth. The scientists allow them to multiply for only a couple of days before flipping that switch to divert the organisms' energy from growth into fuel production. While other companies try to grow as much biomass as possible, Afeyan says, "I want to make as little biomass as I can." In retrospect, the approach might seem obvious. Indeed, the startup Synthetic Genomics and an academic group at the BioTechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota are also working on making fuels directly from carbon dioxide. Joule hopes to succeed by developing both its organisms and its photobioreactor from scratch, so that they work perfectly together.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
Jerome Weingart, Course VIII 1961
solarjerom
04/21/2010
Posts:1
mountainli...
05/16/2010
Posts:9
wealthyche...
05/28/2010
Posts:5
I suggest getting together with some chemical plant service technicians and not just engineers to help with your design. The style of pumps and piping could help you with future cost.
StupidPeas...
04/21/2010
Posts:73
Brian
sls1j
04/21/2010
Posts:12
Sam
ssamd
04/21/2010
Posts:15
MGalvin010...
04/24/2010
Posts:1
mheslep
06/15/2010
Posts:4
If the US and other countries suddenly found they no longer needed Middle Eastern Oil, then we can back off troop deployments, make the policing of hostilities in the region a United Nations matter and finally get out of the mess we created for ourselves. Saves lives and money - makes sense too.
Set up those bioreactors in as many countries as possible and ramp up production ASAP.
Very Cool!!
Very encouraging!!
Bravo!
mkogrady
04/21/2010
Posts:296
Sam
ssamd
04/21/2010
Posts:15
continental U.S. than all the oil in the middle
east. We could be pumping our own oil for sixteen
bucks per barrel.
Having the fuel is of little consequence bacause
of the politics that the world's power brokers
play.
tsleber3
04/21/2010
Posts:5
The same problem of spewing cr*p from underground into the sky.
If we took all the carbon from oil and coal from undergound, the CO2 levels in the air would be 7x that of today. You'd be able to paddle the inland sea from the rockies to the appalachians, thru steaming fetid swamps.
the point is to get some of the 3 terratonnes of CO2 OUT of the atmosphere and make use of it.
Why stop at fuel? you can use carbon to make carbon fiber, nanotubes, carbon girders, and make cars, buildings, and even plastics from it if you throw in some nitrogen and oxygen and a few other things.
erbium
04/21/2010
Posts:218
It is an accepted fact (even by the daffy IPCC) that the human addition to CO2 levels would increase ambient temperature only 1deg C per century. All talk of greater temp increases come from defective computer models that greatly exaggerate positive feedbacks - feedbacks that simply have not materialized in the real world. The models are wrong. The alarmists are wrong. Let's stop wasting our time on non-issues and find some real problems to solve.
MattXL
06/17/2010
Posts:1
jsanders
04/23/2010
Posts:4
jjs
04/26/2010
Posts:27
emptoran
07/22/2010
Posts:1
metinmsm
04/21/2010
Posts:2
KeplersThi...
04/22/2010
Posts:7
Surely there are sufficient large, idle roofs in sunny climes today to accept the first few years of a roll-out.
burnside
04/23/2010
Posts:8
dharik13
05/18/2010
Posts:1
guerojose
04/21/2010
Posts:3
smithsomia...
04/22/2010
Posts:168
When the poster says that few energy sources are as portable or high-density as petroleum products, this is correct, and it is a major stumbling block in long-term energy planning, especially in terms of long-distance transportation. What is lacking in most of the information that I have seen about Joule is the balance of their ability to capture carbon in the production process versus the carbon that would be released in use of their so-called solar fuels. I think Joule sounds extremely promising; I am just curious how much the term "solar fuel" may be greenwashing.
jsanders
04/23/2010
Posts:4
About land use - the article states that the land use is pretty low - "Joule grows the microbes in photobioreactors that need no fresh water and occupy only a fraction of the land needed for biomass-based approaches ...100 times as much fuel per hectare as fermenting corn to produce ethanol, and 10 times as much .. as agricultural waste." With little water required the farms could be put on land which is marginal for agricultural use. OR - use the sea and float these microbes in huge plastic bags anchored to defunct oil drilling platforms. Then tanker ships could go directly to them and fill up. Of course putting them on land could much more efficiently provide for local use as transportation costs would go down considerably.
I do hope this tech works.
It SHOULD make the world a more secure and prosperous place.
danlgarmst...
04/21/2010
Posts:20
The above figures lead to one of two inescapable conclusions:
1)Large scale biofuel production that is burned open loop in vehicles can only be done in the oceans. Thus companies producing/using photosynthetic organisms incompatible with salt water are a waste of time.
2) Biofuels are burned in closed loop electrical power plants where the water is recovered, and all transportation is electric powered (doable BTW, probably even aviation soon). The journal Science contained a study some months ago showing that biofueled electricity w/ electric transportation was indeed more efficient per distance traveled than the open loop method of shipping fuel everywhere to inevitably less efficient ICE vehicles. Anyway, if transportation goes electric I say dispense with the bio madness and go nuclear/wind/solar.
mheslep
06/15/2010
Posts:4
US gov should guaranty buy this bio-diesel on certain price,no quantity limited,for example, (equivalent to oil)$70.
gov should Make sure the company can make good money if they can lower the cost.
DeepOcean
04/21/2010
Posts:8
I suspect this will end up like fuel cells, a product that looks great in lab tests but has been "a year away from commercialization" for most of my lifetime. Even without the biology, fuel cells continue to poison themselves with difficult-to-remove contaminants and waste products. Adding live organisms can only make those problems worse.
LorenAmela...
04/21/2010
Posts:4
Bloom and others are selling fuel cells and people are buying.
Google and Walmart are using them as generators. see article this website and others.
erbium
04/21/2010
Posts:218
smithsomia...
04/22/2010
Posts:168
judbarovsk...
04/22/2010
Posts:9
hoosier co...
04/23/2010
Posts:1
danlgarmst...
04/23/2010
Posts:20
risingblue
04/23/2010
Posts:6
pjduncan
04/23/2010
Posts:17
Hectare = 100 are = 100 * 10*10 m^2 = 10,000 m^2
At 100% conversion efficiency and 10 hours of light
100,000kWh/hectare-day =
2,273 gal(US) equivalent / hectare-day
http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm
US oil consumption is 19.5 million barrels/day.
for the sake of numbers, lets make equivalence between oil/gasoline and estimate how many hectares this habit requires, assuming it can be made to work in industrial quantity.
19.5 * 42 = 819 million gallons/day or
360k hectares which is 1,400 square miles.
Not really all that much. So let's lower the efficiency to 10%, and 14,000 sq.mi. should suffice. Or slightly more than Maryland. An easy fit for Nevada and Arizona.
rotwang
04/26/2010
Posts:1
Fail#2: The incident solar radiation figure of 1000 W/M^2 is correct, but it holds only for a 4 hour on/off model, not 10, and that's only on cloudless days.
mheslep
06/15/2010
Posts:4
Good funding, is money given to the researcher…(This article is a great example) to explore a new concept. This is beneficial and also relatively cheap,(lets face it we researchers will work for peanuts). If the research produces results, than business can work out the ROI. The problem is when the government thinks they know best what technology is best to fund… ie ethanol/analog HDTV, and I’m we can all think of many others.
When government wants to take original research and make costly decisions without regard to ROI, that is when it is extremely ineffective… and expensive…
With regards to AZT, yes this was funded by the government, and then they gave exclusive rights to one prime vender, and the cost for treatment in the early days was thousands of dollars a month. I can’t help think that this was gross government corruption… and I am sure many of the insiders profited considerably. So, even a good funding project can get hijacked.
The neat thing about this article, is that it suggests that it is Co2 neutrality.
I do have one apocalyptic thought, what happens if the bacteria escape it’s environment?
Does this mean that all water sources will become toxic dumps of diesel and sludge?
Also, the switching off of the gene, parallels cancer cells… ????
Ron Hansing 4/27/10
rhansing
04/27/2010
Posts:63
Which begs the question: does the human race need six billion members?
I would venture that six million would be just as good, as long as these are well educated, scientists, engineers, artists, and so on.
Again, most humans only self-subsist, and do not add to human knowledge.
Of course, this is very subjective.
Would one billion be as good as the current six billion? Yes. Then why have six billion?
And of course, the silly details about how to reduce population, and so on, is best left to discuss. My point is that the concept of population reduction is better than all the technological improvements to increase energy production.
baruchatta
05/12/2010
Posts:4
At this point they don't need energy conservation for day to day life because they don't have the energy using items that developed nations tend to have(Advanced technology greatly helps their lives though). Unless we wake up tomorrow and there are half the people on the planet no questions asked (can you say Rapture), even if possible I don't see this solving the problem.
The best solution is a change in people's behavior toward a more conservative lifestyle and a personal desire to be more self reliant.
I'm not talking the kind where you make your own soap, wash your clothes in the creek out back and then hang them to dry on the line. I mean listening to a person's opinion or viewpoint you respect (co-worker, friend, family member, etc.)and other that you don't (a genuine open mind) and doing some digging yourself to determine and understand the actual facts before you make a choice or repeat what you heard as a fact(not a problem with this forum group, but I think we all can agree that there are a lot of people like this). I could go on but don't want to bore people that already think this way!
If we don't start controling ourselves now, think how much more energy we will use in the future. If we have no control over the exponential growth in energy consumption now and un/underdeveloped countries start to utilize some of our past technologies that are cheap and not as energy efficient, combined with population growth in those countries(China!), look out!
It starts with the individual making a decision to be a part of the solution and doing what they can to help. We don't need to turn 180 this moment but doing something no matter how inconsequential it might seem leads to doing more being more acceptible. Look how things like sex, music and technology have adjusted our culture. A couple big moments in the spotlight but most of the change happened over a longer period until it is just a part of our every day life. It won't change over night but good change takes time.
ecoEric
06/08/2010
Posts:1
wealthyche...
05/28/2010
Posts:5
This could eliminate famine and hunger and reduce disease on a global basis.
iajzenszmi
05/30/2010
Posts:3