Joule Cranks Up the Hype Machine

One way life is imitating art today involves what Michael Douglas' Gordon Gecko calls "the next bubble" in last year's film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Spoiler alert, but the plot hinges on efforts to get a scientist (played by Austin Pendleton) financing for an alternative energy venture, one which when explained sounds faintly ridiculous.

How does this sort of thing play out in the real world? Let's see.

Joule Unlimited, incubated by MIT venture capitalist Noubar Afeyan, has begun banging the publicity drum for its bacterial energy platform.

As with algae biofuels, which have gotten interest from major oil companies, Joule's technology is based on a controlled biological reaction which creates usable hydrocarbons as a byproduct. Unlike the other algae-lovers, Joule uses a cyanobacteria, which lacks a nucleus, mitochondria or chloroplasts, in his reaction.

Joule has engineered one of these beasties with a pathway for saturated synthesis and secretion of alkanes (saturated hydrocarbons), along with a mechanism to control whether carbon is used for growth or alkane production. The result, in theory, is solar efficiency close to that of CIGS thin film (about 7%) although Joule's scientific paper on its process sees a theoretical maximum of 12%.

All good in theory. The question is whether this can scale. Thus the publicity parade.

Afeyan's firm, Flagship Ventures, got the ball rolling in January by recruiting Obama transition team head John Podesta to its board of directors.

Last month Joule and Flagship sent out press releases on the coming “peer reviewed article” by senior vice president Dan Robertson, who had previously worked on cellulosic alcohol bacteria with Verenium Corp., one of those older algae biofuel outfits that sold out to big oil (in this case BP).

It all goes into overdrive this week with a series of talks by CEO Bill Sims (best known for running Color Kinetics, an LED lighting company now owned by Philips) at a Wall Street Journal-sponsored environmental conference  and a Houston energy conference headlined by former Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr.

The aim of the tour seems to be to get the Joule story in front of scouts for the big California venture capitalists and the big Houston energy companies, then make a deal. Probably through some real-life Shia LeBeouf.

It's important to note at this point that, hype aside, there is not yet even a demonstration plant built for this process. If it can scale economically in the demonstration plant, then Joule may be ready to seek capital for a serious facility, assuming governments aren't feeling so burned by past failures in biomass that they can't find the capital.

But if this is as good as Joule claims, no public money will be needed to prove it.