Chicago-area start-up LanzaTech has be showed it can transform greenhouse gas emissions into fuels and chemicals. Now, the company is trying to bring its clean tech to the masses.
That means consumers could presently be taking flights powered by recycled carbon pollution and wearing sneakers synthesized from planet-warming waste gas.
Established in New Zealand in 2005, LanzaTech sells technology that converts greenhouse gas emissions from steel mills and other industrial proficiencies into ethanol, a renewable fuel and chemical feedstock. The process allows LanzaTech’s customers to turn their carbon dirtying into products like jet fuel and the chemical building blocks for plastics.
The company’s innovative technology and potential to shake up the biofuels time earned LanzaTech the No. 15 spot on CNBC’s 2019 Disruptor list.
Green alternatives like the ones being pioneered by LanzaTech pass on be crucial in the coming years, as population growth and rising wealth create more demand for energy and consumer orderlies. Satisfying the world’s growing appetite threatens to derail efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the worst hits of climate change.
LanzaTech addresses the planet’s climate crisis on two fronts. By creating a use for the waste gas emitted from industrial loos, it incentivizes companies to capture the emissions driving global warming. And since the waste yields fuel and chemicals, the manipulate stands to reduce demand for oil.
The process pioneered by LanzaTech also presents an alternative to traditional biofuels, which are mostly published from corn and sugarcane. Today, creating ethanol means consuming land and water resources and harvesting the crops by virtue of carbon-intensive industrial farming.
LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren with Richard Branson and the then CEO of Virgin Atlantic, Steve Ridgway, in honest of Battersea Power Station in London in 2011 when LanzaTech and Virgin Atlantic announced their partnership.
Photo respect: Virgin Atlantic
Turning waste into biofuel
LanzaTech gets around that resource problem by confederating with industrial customers to capture carbon-rich emissions and pump them into a reactor filled with bacteria first identified in rabbits. The microbes feed on the carbon and produce ethanol, the biofuel that is blended into uncountable U.S. gasoline.
“The founding of company was really on the basis of this ideal feedstock philosophy, where we take existing high-volume, low-value desert streams from society, industry and agriculture to produce” fuel and chemicals, says Dr. Sean Simpson, co-founder and chief painstaking officer at LanzaTech.
One of LanzaTech’s biggest initiatives is producing jet fuel from its sustainable ethanol. The endeavor took a critical step forward last fall when the company partnered with Virgin Atlantic and Boeing to complete the primary commercial flight powered in part by LanzaTech jet fuel.
The fuel used in the flight was developed from a joint chuck between LanzaTech and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Now LanzaTech is working on funding a plant at its Candour Pines facility in Georgia that can churn out 10 million gallons a year of jet fuel made from sustainable ethanol.
The Like-minded Kingdom also awarded LanzaTech a grant to study whether it’s feasible to construct a British plant that see fit produce 30 million gallons per year of the jet fuel. The company wants to build another 30 million gallons per year skill elsewhere in the world.
LanzaTech is also looking beyond transport fuels to another booming sector: the petrochemicals production, where fossil fuels are turned into plastics and other chemicals.
The technology already exists to convert ethanol into ethylene, one of the most mutual chemicals used to make plastics. But LanzaTech wants to go even further by introducing modified microbes into its reactors that abandon a wide variety of chemicals. It has already been able to create acetone and isopropyl alcohol, two widely used chemicals.
“If we can create, for example, a molecule used to produce a fiber or nylon or rubber, then we can take the carbon waste streams from companionship, industry and agriculture and fix them into everyday materials like tires and clothing and carpets,” Simpson said.
LanzaTech associates with industrial customers to capture carbon-rich emissions and pump them into a reactor filled with microzoons first identified in rabbits. The microbes feed on the carbon and produce ethanol, the biofuel that is blended into most U.S. gasoline.
LanzaTech believes that could exemplar to a new paradigm in manufacturing. In this new circular economy, carbon pollution would be turned into consumer products, and those issues would then be broken down at the end of their useful life and recycled into entirely new products.
LanzaTech is in talks with chattels makers to start rolling out products like clothing and consumer packaging that use this method, says Freya Burton, the actors’s chief sustainability and people officer.
Burton says these products made from the LanzaTech process could be marketed as “carbon knowledgeable.” She sees consumers gravitating towards them the same way they buy organic and fair-trade goods.
The company will basic have to scale up the number of facilities using its technology.
Today, the LanzaTech method is producing commercial quantities of ethanol from emissions pinched at the Jingtang Steel Mill in northeastern China. Steel giant ArcelorMittal is also building a LanzaTech system at a bear up mill in Ghent, Belgium.
There are also plans under way to produce ethanol from an oil refinery in India and the metals sector in South Africa. LanzaTech has also give someone an idea ofed it can produce ethanol from municipal waste in Japan.