With two unanimous votes, the City Council approved a zoning change and an agreement to lease five acres of city land to a bio-energy firm working to develop its process for producing renewable forms of transportation fuels.
The lease, a one-year, renewable agreement, will allow Joule Biotechnologies, Inc., to use five acres of the city’s seven-acre lot for $1-a-year for its first large-scale pilot plant for producing bio-energy fuels.
The land, located adjacent to the city’s wastewater treatment plant on Old FM 2243, was rezoned as a special district two, a research and development district, Dec. 10 by the city planning and zoning commission in response to the company’s request.
The special zoning district applies to the land only as long as the company continues lease with the city.
Joule has approved the lease agreement and is working with local contractors to develop the plant site as the first large-scale outdoor laboratory for the Massachusetts-based, green energy company.
The company has said the development of the land will include a few buildings, a security fence and system around the field of shallow panels that will hold the fuel-producing solution.
Recently, the company was named No. 32 of the nation’s Hottest 50 Companies in Bioenergy.  Joule was relatively unknown in the bio energy industry until July when it announced plans for creating ethanol and diesel fuel from an unnamed microorganism.
Scientists with Joule say they have, with a genetically-altered microbe, created a one-step process that uses photosynthesis to produce ethanol using sunlight and carbon dioxide. The company has patented its HelioCulture and SolarConverter and currently has other technologies under the patent protection process.
Joule’s photosynthesis-driven process eliminates the middle steps of using raw-materials for production. The organism bathed in small amounts of water – gray water or treated wastewater readily available from the city’s treatment plant, will sweat ethanol – or whatever the organism is prescribed to chemically produce.
Joule president and CEO Bill Sims has not disclosed what the organism or microbe is, only to say it is not algae, and that it is a naturally occurring organism that can survive only within a small temperature range.
Algae and other agricultural products such as corn are being used as a renewable source of ethanol and other fuels, but the process requires a large use of land to produce the crops and involved multi-steps to convert it into a fuel.
In August, the company met with city officials while considering multiple site locations within the Southwest United States. Sims. In November, City Manager Biff Johnson and a couple staff members visited the company’s headquarters in Boston.
In November, Joule announced the company had achieved success in producing diesel fuel molecules with their engineered organisms in their Honolulu, Hawaii site.
“This achievement marks a critical step towards making renewable diesel fuel a reality at high volumes and competitive costs,” Sims said. “This latest milestone opens the door to an industry-changing technology.”
The company plans to begin work on its Leander site in the first quarter of 2010.