Just don’t call them a biofuel firm, says Bill Sims, CEO of a startup called Joule Biotechnologies that is officially launching on Monday. Biofuels have gotten a bad rap and Joule wants none of the negative PR. But there’s actually a difference in what Joule does: instead of growing crops on land like more traditional biofuel technologies do, the company has developed a hybrid system that uses a solar concentrating converter that is filled with brackish water, nutrients and a “highly engineered synthetic organism,” to produce a bio-based fuel. The solar system, called a HelioCulture, concentrates sunlight onto the mixture, and the engineered photosynthetic organism — which Sims wouldn’t elaborate on, only to say it’s not algae — converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethanol or a hydrocarbon-based fuel called a “SolarFuel.”
