According to Joule, in the past two years it’s developed its Helioculture technology—a process that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into the company’s SolarFuel liquid energy in a SolarConverter device.”

How does it work? It’s not exactly simple but the good news is, it doesn’t need farmland or fresh water. In the company’s own words, the patent-pending Helioculture™ technology “leverages highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and CO2 to usable transportation fuels and chemicals. The scalable SolarConverter™ system facilitates the entire process—from sunlight capture to product conversion and separation—with minimal resources and polishing operations. This represents a significant advantage over biomass-derived biofuels, including newer algae- and cellulose-based forms, which are hindered by varying obstacles: costly biomass production, numerous processing steps, substantial scale-up risk and capital costs.”

Joule SolarConverter

Basically biotech agents use sunlight to transform CO2 to fuel (and by-products) — and according to the company at a cost of less than $50 per barrel (current price per barrel is approximately $70 per barrel).

Currently, the U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil every day according to the CIA. Joule says it can create 20,000 gallons of SolarFuel liquid energy per acre per year. So let’s do the math: 20,000 gallons of SolarFuel liquid energy equals about 476 barrels of oil. 476 barrels divided by 365 days per year equals 1.3 barrels produced per day per acre. That’s a whole mess of acres needed to get this beast going to make a dent in the nation’s energy needs.

But… the company says the product is scalable and already has a SolarCollecter prototype running in New Mexico.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Joule in 2010.