Joule has been conducting pilot operations to test its novel process for directly converting sunlight to fungible diesel and ethanol without raw material feedstocks for over one year, and will begin construction of its first demonstration-scale plant this quarter.
“We started with a big and four years later we’ve proven the process, optimised the technology, built a strong patent portfolio and laid the groundwork for commercial production to begin in 2013. We will bring much-needed scalability and infrastructure-readiness to the renewable fuels space, with a platform that can yield multiple products, including valuable, fungible diesel fuel vs. a blendstock like biodiesel,” explains Bill Sims, President and CEO of the company.
“We are honoured to be the Wall Street Journal’s choice for the most innovative energy company, and to be recognised even beyond our industry as one of the world’s top innovators overall. We appreciate this recognition of our company’s efforts to successfully innovate outside of today’s common ‘biofuel’ definition,” said Sims.
As stated in the Journal’s report by Kenny Tang, one of the independent judges and founder & CEO of Oxbridge Weather Capital, “In bypassing the limitations of expensive processes in conventional biofuel production, Joule’s technology has the exciting potential to significantly transform the economics of the biofuel industry. If translated into wider use, it is a potential game changer—it could become a cost-effective replacement to petroleum on a much wider scale than previously possible, especially with its non-reliance on biomass.”
Unlike the costly, multi-step production of biofuels from biomass, Joule’s Heliocultureplatform directly and continuously converts solar energy to infrastructure-compatible fuels and chemicals, including fungible diesel and ethanol. The platform combines breakthroughs in genome engineering, process engineering and solar capture and conversion to achieve productivities that will be up to 100X greater than biomass-dependent processes, while avoiding depletion of agricultural land or fresh water. Using sunlight and waste CO2 from industrial emitters or pipelines, with a modular SolarConverter system that allows ease of scale, Joule targets commercial production of up to 15,000 gallons of diesel and 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre annually, at stable costs as low as $20/bble and $0.60/gallon respectively, including subsidies.
To select the award winners, a team of Journal editors and reporters reviewed the entries and forwarded 155 to an independent panel of judges from venture capital firms, universities and other organizations and companies. From that pool, the judges chose a total of 35 winners and runners-up in 16 categories. The judges assessed entrants on the following criteria: whether the innovation breaks with conventional ideas or processes in its field, whether it goes beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists, and whether it will have a wide impact in its field or on future technology.
Complete coverage of the 2011 Technology Innovation Awards is accessible online.
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