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Joule says “will go commercial in 2017″: solar fuels on the way March 23, 2015 | Jim Lane     “Staged industrialization process” beginning; exotic yields from an exotic organism that uses CO2, water and nutrients and secretes ethanol or diesel. Former Total, Alcatel CEO Serge Tchuruk is now at the helm as the Joule team updates The Digest on the progress in New Mexico. For fans of the “solar renewable fuels” company Joule, there’s significant news from Bedford: the company has announced that it will undertake a “staged industrialization process”, to culminate in a 1000-acre production plant starting construction...

Imagine this: you're gushing blood. Nothing seems to make it stop. Then you apply a gel to your wound, and within seconds, the bleeding stops. In minutes, you're healed. This is the premise of VetiGel, an algae-based polymer created by Joe Landolina — a 22 year-old who invented the product when he was just 17. Landolina is now the co-founder and CEO of Suneris, a biotech company that manufactures the gel. Last week, Suneris announced that it will begin shipping VetiGel to veterinarians later this summer. Humans won't be far behind. When injected into a wound site, the gel can...

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY (Calif.) - A third dog died Thursday after exposure to toxic algae at an East Bay park, and broken-hearted dog owners say the park district's warnings have been too little, too late. "It's this green algae that's everywhere, it's fatally toxic to dogs, "warned Katie Stone, intercepting hikers at the Lake Chabot marina Friday evening. "She was healthy as can be, I walked her about five miles every day, " Stone says sadly, showing a snapshot of her five year old chocolate Labrador, Josie. "It's completely unbelievable, it was like a nightmare, like when am I going...

A strange green organism has spread around the globe, clogging up the world's rivers It began with a few small strange patches of slime, clinging to the rocks of the Heber River in Canada. Within a year, the patches had become thick, blooming mats. Within a few years the mats had grown into a giant green snot. And within a few decades this snot had spread around the world, clogging up rivers as far away as South America, Europe and Australasia. This snot, which is still flourishing today, is caused by a microscopic alga, a diatom that goes by its...

he MPCA issued the alert Thursday following the death of a dog last weekend in Sherburne County. Brock Tatge, the dog’s owner, told the MPCA that he and his family were spending time last Sunday on Prairie Lake, where they live, when their dog, Copper, suddenly became ill. The dog had been fetching a tennis ball from the lake. “We noticed that Copper went on shore, began vomiting and panting very hard, and just looked very sick,” Tatge said. “I carried him to my truck and brought him to the vet’s office.” Copper’s condition deteriorated and he died at the...

The Department of Defense (DOD) paid $150 per gallon for alternative jet fuel made from algae, more than 64 times the current market price for standard carbon-based fuels, according to a report released on Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in its report that a Pentagon official reported paying “about $150 per gallon for 1,500 gallons of alternative jet fuel derived from algal oil.” GAO’s report examined the financial challenges facing increased purchases and use of alternative jet fuels by federal agencies. “Currently, the price for alternative jet fuels exceeds that of conventional jet fuel,” the report noted. The...

By 1997, with the word out that NASA planned to land on Mars, bin Laden called for all Americans and Jews, including children, to be killed. That summer three of his operatives living in Yemen launched a little known threat against NASA, via the judicial system. They warn both NASA and the USA that the Yemeni people (of which bin Laden is a member and believes he can trace his blood line back to the time of Queen Sheba) own Mars and they have 3,000-year-old (Sumerian?) tablets to prove it. On July 24th of 1997 the Al-Thawn weekly newspaper reported...

Arguments put forward to support ethanol and other biofuels hold water like sieves – leaking billions of gallons of precious fresh water that are required to produce this expensive, unsustainable energy. These and other renewable energy programs may have originated for the best of intentions. However, the assumptions underlying those intentions are questionable, at best. Many are rooted in anti-hydrocarbon worldviews and Club of Rome strategies that raised the specter of “looming disasters” like resource depletion and catastrophic manmade global warming, in which the “real enemy” is “humanity itself.” They also underscore how hard it is to alter policies and...

PRINCETON, N.J. & CAMBRIDGE, Mass--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NRG Energy, Inc. (NYSE:NRG) and GreenFuel Technologies Corporation (GreenFuel) announced today the commencement of field testing GreenFuel’s proprietary Emissions-to-Biofuels™ technology at NRG’s Big Cajun II – a 1,489 net megawatt coal-fueled power plant in New Roads, Louisiana. GreenFuel’s Emissions-to-Biofuels™ process uses naturally occurring algae to capture and reduce flue gas carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. The energy-rich algae are harvested daily and can be converted into a broad range of biofuels or high-value animal feed supplements. Power generators can choose to dry and store the carbon-rich algae biomass for use as renewable fuel...

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are pioneering a process that produces oil from algae in just one hour. Wet algae goes in, heat and pressure is applied, and crude oil comes out. From the PNNL itself: “It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” said [Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research]. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.” The...

Enlarge Image Green crude. Harvesting oil produced by algae at Sapphire Energy's Green Crude Farm in Columbus, New Mexico. A new report says such existing technologies will need to use fewer external inputs to become sustainable. Credit: Sapphire Energy A report out today from the National Research Council (NRC) of the U.S. National Academies says that large-scale production of biofuels from algae is untenable with existing technology, as it would require the use of too much water, energy, and fertilizer. To improve matters, the report's authors suggest that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which supports much of the...

University of Arizona (UA) researchers believe the microscopic organism algae will be providing fuel to power vehicles within the next five years. Joel Cuello, UA professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, said algae has been proven as a renewable source of fuels like ethanol, biodiesel, and hydrogen, and his research team is working on ways to make such algae biofuels cheaper and commercially feasible. "I really believe we will be able to make use of algae-based biofuels, probably in two to three years," Cuello said. "We will have the right mix of technologies in place in two to three years,...

Platinum-catalyzed photosynthetic process creates high-yield sustainable source of hydrogenKNOXVILLE -- In the quest to make hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel source, researchers have been stymied about how to create usable hydrogen that is clean and sustainable without relying on an intensive, high-energy process that outweighs the benefits of not using petroleum to power vehicles. New findings from a team of researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, however, show that photosynthesis – the process by which plants regenerate using energy from the sun – may function as that clean, sustainable source of hydrogen. The...

If consumers are getting gouged, then gas station owners are being impaled. When gasoline prices spike, as they have in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, windfall profits rarely accrue to gas station owners. Kim Do, owner of a Coast station in Pleasanton, Calif., reports that in the immediate aftermath of the storm, she lost 8 to 10 cents on every gallon of gas she sold. "Customers are very angry—they call my prices a rip-off," Do says. "I tell them, 'I'm just like you.'" In fact, because retail prices are stickier than wholesale ones, gas stations make the fattest profits when...

Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.(snip) In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae. With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel...

A small San Diego company is teaming up with one of the nation’s largest oil refiners to bring an algae-based crude closer to market. It’s called green crude — even though it’s not exactly green in color when it’s ready to hit the refineries. Sapphire Energy, the six-year-old company that makes the renewable crude, harvests algae biomass from photosynthetic microorganisms at a “crude farm” in New Mexico and turns it into oil. The company wants to make 1 billion gallons of the stuff every year by 2025. Sapphire said Tuesday it has signed a contract with Houston refining giant Phillips...

Algae suit generates food to feed your constant hunger When we think of futuristic fashion, our minds often lean toward the minimalist designs of Star Trek or Tron. But maybe what we wear in the future will have more to do with what we eat than what we want to look like. That's the premise behind the algaculture symbiosis suit designed by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. The symbiosis suit is designed to make food for you as you go about your daily routine. A number of tubes, placed in front of your mouth, harness the CO2 you breathe and...

Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) is cutting its losses on algae biofuels after investing over $100 million only to find that it couldn’t achieve commercial viability. Earlier this week, Exxon announced that while it wasn’t throwing in the towel, it would be forced to restructure its algae research with partner California-based Synthetic Genomics Inc (SGI).

Pond scum – algae – gained prominence a few years ago, emerging from research obscurity to hog the green limelight. With questions over growing food crops for biodiesel and concerns over fuel security and global warming, algae seemed to offer a renewable, carbon-neutral source of fuel. Algal cultivation could use a large amount of non-arable land without harming food production, said the sales pitch, and its demand for water could be met with non-potable supplies, even saline or wastewater. As algal biochemist Alison Smith of the University of Cambridge, UK, explains, ‘I was being phoned up every five minutes by...

As debate continues over raising the ethanol content in motor fuel to reduce emissions, another form of green energy is coloring the discussion. And it’s not just pond scum anymore. On Jan. 1, Congress made algae-based fuel production eligible for a $1.01-per-gallon cellulosic biofuel production federal tax credit. Cellulosic biofuels typically are made from woody, non-food material such as grasses or wood chips, in contrast to ethanol, which competes with the food market for raw material — usually corn in the United States and sugar cane in some other countries. But algae has another big advantage that makes it attractive...