S54: HELIOCULTURE™: A systems approach to photosynthetic fuel and chemical production

Disruptive technologies transform markets by pushing beyond apparent boundaries of cost and productivity. Helioculture is a transformational technology that efficiently captures solar energy and waste carbon dioxide to catalyze the direct-to-product synthesis of renewable fuels and chemicals. A combination of key design features enables step-change productivity advances over competing biotechnologies that rely on biomass conversions. The Helioculture process uses a cyanobacterium engineered to partition the majority of photosynthetically fixed carbon to a product pathway, to secrete the product and to operate semi-continuously in a closed reactor. The organism can be engineered to produce a variety of fuels and value-added commodity chemicals. Data will be presented to demonstrate the photosynthetic production of ethanol and various hydrocarbon products. The photobioreactor is designed to maximize areal insolation, to reject IR and UV radiation and to rapidly mix a dense culture to optimize gas mass transfer and match the kinetics of photosynthetic light and dark reactions.  In addition, the process can use non-potable water and non-arable land. We report here on the photocatalyst and process design as well as the theoretical and practical productivities of the process, and also outline progress in implementing Helioculture at scale.