Joule bags $40m for CO2-to-ethanol project

Joule has closed a $40 million in private equity and venture debt financing led by existing investors, including Flagship Ventures, and brings the company’s total to $200 million raised to date.The proceeds will be applied towards a staged industrialization of its patented, reverse-combustion process, including the near-term expansion of Joule’s production field in Hobbs, New Mexico.

This will lead to the longer-term build-out of a 1,000-acre plant to begin in 2017. In an optimal location, a plant of this size has the potential to convert 150,000 tonnes of waste CO2 into 25 million gallons of ethanol or 15 million gallons of diesel per year – with no reliance on arable land, crops or fresh water. The phased build-out will demonstrate the scalability of Joule’s modular SolarConverter® system, which enables the direct, continuous production of fuel from CO2 and sunlight.

Joule’s fuels are derived directly from sunlight and waste CO2 in a single conversion step. The process uses engineered catalysts to directly produce ethanol or diesel-range alkanes in a continuous process for many weeks at a time.