Engineering organisms for industrial fuel production

Abstract

Volatile fuel costs, need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and fuel security concerns are driving efforts to produce sustainable renewable fuels and chemicals.  Petroleum comes from sunlight, CO₂, and water converted via a biological intermediate into fuel over a several million year timescale.  It stands to reason that using biology to short-circuit this time cycle offers an attractive alternative-but only with relevant products at or below market prices.  The state of the art of biological engineering over the past five years has progressed to allow for market needs to drive innovation rather than trying to adapt existing approaches to the market.  This report describes two innovations using synthetic biology to dis-intermediate fuel production.  LS9 is developing a means to convert biological intermediates such as cellulosic hydrolysates into drop-in hydrocarbon product replacements such as diesel.  Joule Unlimited is pioneering approaches eliminate feedstock dependency by efficiently capturing sunlight, CO₂, and water to produce fuels and chemicals.  The innovations behind these companies are built with the market in mind, focused on low cost biosynthesis of existing products of the petroleum industry.  Through successful deployment of technologies such as those behind LS9 and Joule, alternative sources of petroleum products will mitigate the many of the issues faced with our petroleum-based economy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many scientists, engineers and advisors who have worked on making the innovations behind LS9 and Joule Unlimited a reality.

Figures and Tables

Figure 1 Schematic of Joule Unlimited Helioculture system. Proprietary organisms are engineered to convert sunlight, CO₂ and non-fresh water to industrially relevant end-products. The engineered organisms are housed within a Solar Converter, which represents a single rector unit. Operational modules are constructed by interconnecting several Solar Converters. This allows for reaction condition control as well as continuous separations. Figure from www.jouleunlimited.com/why-solar-fuel/how-it-works