Carbon Rebrand: The Carbon Transformation Technology Developed by California-based Twelve Splits Apart Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

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August 28, 2024

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by Lisa Gibson (SAF Magazine) The Carbon Transformation Technology developed by California-based Twelve splits apart carbon dioxide (CO2) at low temperatures using electrochemistry, creating foundational elements for fuels, chemicals and plastics.

Twelve, founded in 2016, has partnered for demonstration projects to produce the world’s first laundry detergent ingredients from CO2 with Procter & Gamble, the world’s first car parts from CO2 with Mercedes Benz and, most recently, the world’s first e-jet fuel from CO2 with the United States Air Force. “As we’ve embarked on this journey, not only have we invented our technology, but we’ve also seen the right amount of investment and support from the right partners and customers,” says Ashwin Jadhav, vice president of business development at Twelve. “We’ve seen and participated in many sectors growing.”

With so many potential applications, Twelve chose to focus first on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) because of its demand and impact, according to Jadhav and Nicholas Flanders, Twelve cofounder and CEO. SAF provides a ready market and customers with a strong drive to decarbonize, as well as incentives through state programs and the Inflation Reduction Act. But fundamentally, the technology is ideally suited for e-fuels, with its low-temperature process and ability to integrate with a variety of electricity sources, including (and preferably) renewables, Flanders says.

Jadhav also emphasizes the immediate need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

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Alaska Airlines is the first commercial airline partner and, along with Microsoft, already has off-take agreements in place for the e-jet fuel produced at Twelve’s first commercial-scale production plant, currently under construction in Moses Lake, Washington. “We’ve really anchored on SAF as a core product,” Flanders says.

Cyclical Carbon Economy
Though carbon capture has become a key piece of the solution to reducing emissions, Jadhav envisions a more circular, useful application. “At Twelve, we believe in taking that carbon and transforming it. That captured carbon goes back into the operational loop. So, we’re creating a cyclical carbon economy ... it thereby eliminates the reliance on fossil fuels, because you’re using the carbon dioxide as a feedstock.”

Carbon Transformation Technology is a CO2 electrolyzer that uses renewable electricity, CO2 and water to produce carbon monoxide. That outputted carbon monoxide is added to hydrogen (also produced by Twelve through water electrolysis) to make syngas, what Jadhav calls a “foundational element.” To produce the e-jet fuel, that syngas is run through a Fischer-Tropsch reactor. The result is an ASTM-certified, drop-in fuel that will not need recertification.

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Then, in 2021, the Air Force expressed interest, not only for sustainability and flexibility, but also as a means to save lives, as fuel transports are often targeted, Flanders says. Twelve started to look toward commercialization and further scale-up, eventually growing to 270 employees. The company is well funded, Jadhav says, and raised over $250 million in the past few years. “The amount of confidence and support we’ve seen from investors and partners has been tremendous. We’ve attracted some of the biggest investors,” he says, citing Microsoft, Capricorn Investment Group, DCVC and Microsoft Climate Investment Fund. Twelve also has a 14-year, multimillion-gallon deal with International Airlines Group, as well as an agreement with the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, a group of corporate customers interested in purchasing SAF credits.

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The CO2 supply for the plant will come from undisclosed ethanol producers. “It’s fairly concentrated CO2, it’s fairly clean, which means it’s relatively easy and cheap to capture and process,” Flanders says. “We’re quite compatible with this existing industry that’s making biogenic CO2 emissions, and we can now put them to use and turn them into clean fuel.” Estimating CO2 emissions of about 40 million tons across the U.S. ethanol industry annually, Flanders says, “There’s a huge amount of CO2 that’s just being thrown away every day. We can turn that CO2 into e-jet fuel.”

The goal for scale-up is to colocate near ethanol plants for Twelve’s dozen or so future U.S. facilities, Flanders says, before branching out internationally. Siting what Twelve calls AirPlants—producing e-jet fuel and e-naphtha—relies heavily upon demand, electricity costs and policy environments. READ MORE

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The Clean Jet-Fuel Technology Winning Over Wall Street (Wall Street Journal/Yahoo! Finance)
Twelve, the carbon transformation company that converts captured carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals, fuels, and other essential products typically made from fossil fuels, today announced $645 million in funding. (The Rise Fund)
12 reflections on Twelve, it’s monster $645M raise, the progress, the future (Biofuels Digest)

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal/Yahoo! Finance: The latest is a company called Twelve, which raised $645 million from backers including the private-equity firm TPG and Alaska Airlines in one of the largest investments ever for clean jet fuel.

The investment values Twelve at more than $1 billion. It is one of several startups using a chemical process that mimics photosynthesis to produce jet fuel with far lower emissions than fossil fuels. They are raising significant amounts of cash in the midst of a rush of funding deals.

Last week, Brookfield Asset Management said it would invest more than $200 million into a company called Infinium that has a generally similar approach. Brookfield might put in up to $850 million more. A few years ago, Prometheus Fuels, a startup with a deal to sell fuel to American Airlines that has a comparable process, hit a $1 billion valuation. A competitor called HIF Global is also a unicorn after raking in investment.

Investors are shifting their bets in clean fuels to companies that use chemistry to turn carbon dioxide, water and renewable electricity into energy. Known as eFuels, synthetic fuels or power to liquids technologies, they offer the tantalizing possibility of producing limitless amounts if given enough cheap renewable power.

“This actually has a shot at eventually replacing fossil fuels,” said Zachary Bogue, co-managing partner at the venture-capital firm DCVC. It was one of Twelve’s first investors and is putting money in again in the new fundraising.

Such approaches are seen as the most practical long-term fuel source. Airlines are currently using some biofuels, which are made from fats, oils and greases; trash; or plants. The supply of these will likely be constrained eventually by the availability of feedstock material and land.

Many clean fuels projects are facing high costs and failures, contributing to Air New Zealand’s recent shelving of a 2030 emissions target.

The wave of investment into eFuels backs a trend in the energy transition under which companies with cash and the backing of big companies emerge as potential winners. READ MORE

Excerpt from The Rise Fund: Twelve, the carbon transformation company that converts captured carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals, fuels, and other essential products typically made from fossil fuels, today announced $645 million in funding. This raise is a strategic mix of capital which includes $400 million in project equity led by TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing, and an additional $45 million in credit facilities from leading funders in the renewable energy sector marking this as one of the largest financing rounds to date in the e-fuels space.

The funding accelerates Twelve's goals of defossilizing manufacturing processes, focusing first on emissions generated by aviation. This includes the completion of AirPlant™ One, Twelve's inaugural sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant located in Moses Lake, Washington, which is expected to begin production in 2025. AirPlant One is the first of many facilities throughout the country to make E-Jet® fuel, using the company's patented technology to produce SAF derived from biogenic CO2, water, and renewable energy sources which achieves lifecycle emissions up to 90% lower than conventional fossil jet fuel.

TPG Rise Climate has committed up to $400 million in project equity financing to support the development of future AirPlants, which will supply Twelve's E-Jet fuel to customers like Alaska Airlines and International Aviation Group (IAG), parent company of British Airways. Launched in 2021, TPG Rise Climate is a $7.3 billion climate impact fund by alternative asset manager TPG's global impact investing platform.

"We are drawn to companies and founders that have developed and proven unique solutions to complex problems. Twelve is a clear leader in CO2 conversion technology, which is a core part of the power-to-liquids technology stack and the process we believe represents the long-term, scalable solution for SAF production," said Jonathan Garfinkel, a Managing Partner at TPG Rise Climate.

"The energy transition will require a clean alternative to traditional jet fuel. SAF demand continues to grow, and we look forward to partnering with Twelve to build world class capabilities and facilities to meet that demand," added Elizabeth Stone, Principal at TPG Rise Climate and a member of Twelve's board of directors.

In addition to project equity financing, TPG is leading Twelve's Series C round alongside Capricorn Investment Group and Pulse Fund. Twelve has raised approximately $200 million with Fifth Wall, northstar.vc, TGVP, Alaska Airlines' investment arm Alaska Star Ventures, and existing investors, such as Series B lead investor DCVC, Munich Re Ventures, Emerson Collective, and others.

"Over the last several years we have appreciated getting to know the team at Twelve. Together we are building a multi-level partnership to expand supply, mature the market for SAF, and to soon use their E-Jet fuel in our operations," said Diana Birkett Rakow, senior vice president of public affairs and sustainability at Alaska Airlines. "Twelve's technology is promising in the pursuit of long-term scalable supply of SAF. In order to meet our company's – and our industry's – ambitious decarbonization goals, we need new technologies like the one Twelve has developed and commercialized. We are excited to be part of this round of forward-looking funders to make a more sustainable future for aviation possible."

Most recently, Twelve also raised $45 million in total loans across two lenders. Clean energy investment firm Fundamental Renewables provided a $25 million construction loan, and multinational bank Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation closed a $20 million green loan in support of Twelve's carbon transformation technology.

"Our financing strategy has been to build a comprehensive capital stack that enables us to deliver product to customers at scale while continually driving down costs," said Nicholas Flanders, Chief Executive Officer at Twelve. "We're proud to work with visionary financing partners and collaborators who share our commitment to deploying first of a kind technologies that address climate change at scale." READ MORE

Excerpt from Biofuels Digest:

Twelve began some years ago known obscurely as Opus 12, which are to cognoscenti the variations Brillantes of Chopin, and a brilliant variation it was on the usual scheme for SAF, at the time. The world was going for HEFA fuels, and ran into the feedstock shortage problem, which caused prices to rise, airlines to cringe, big strategics to balk. Some feedstock developers, Sustainable Oils, Nuseed, Terviva and Covercress come to mind, have worked hard on expanding supply, but what is needed is millions of acres, now.

4. The idea of eSAF is elegantly simple. Carbon from waste CO2, hydrogen from (usually) water. Feedstock problem, solved, for perhaps the rest of the century. Now, comes the pesky problem of aggregating feedstock in the right way, conditioning it, avoiding bankruptcy via the well-known “splitting water with electricity at catastrophically low yields” path to ruin, and, more to the point, a process to combine the C and the H into a hydrocarbon.

5. Alvin Leung describes the Twelve system thus: “I work with the CO2 electrolyzer that takes water, CO2, and electricity to produce CO. Just like a typical water electrolyzer, the anode of our CO2 electrolyzer pulls electrons from the H20 to create gas phase oxygen (which leaves the anode in the water) and hydrogen ions (H+). The hydrogen ions conduct across our proton exchange membrane (PEM) to the cathode. The cathode is where the real magic happens: it mixes CO2 with the electrons pulled from the anode, water and the hydrogen ion to create CO and water. Our reaction is not 100% efficient so we do end up creating some hydrogen (which isn’t terrible since we need H2 to make syngas)… Ideally, we would put in just enough CO2 to fully convert to CO, but in reality we input more CO2 than is required for the reaction so we end up with some CO2 that exits from the cathode with the CO and the H2. It’s a closed system, so no CO2 is emitted! We measure how little CO2 is required by a value called CO2 to CO Utilization. All of our electrochemical work and stack design is about making this system last longer with higher NFY_CO and higher CO2 to CO Utilization.”

6. So, there you have it, presto change-o, soda into fuel.

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Well, more from Twelve’s Leung on this: “The CO is then combined with H2, electrolyzed via water electrolysis, to make synthesis gas, a combination of CO and H2, often referred to as syngas. The Syngas is sent through a Fischer–Tropsch process which converts it into liquid hydrocarbons. This resulting mix of hydrocarbons resembles crude oil produced conventionally, which can then be processed in many different ways.”

8. Ah, Fischer-Tropsch. From that pathway, in the field of industrial technology, never has been made so little A, by so many B, from so much C. Substitute fuel, companies, money for A, B. C.

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These days, Grand Coulee’s power and the nearby sources of water are used for less exotic applications, perhaps int his case no less important, if you recall that the Pacific theater if World War II began as an energy resources war. We’re still scrambling to make the world’s energy supply sustainable and secure. Twelve has a place in that. If it works and when it works at sufficient scale. Not unlike the challenges faced in the Manhattan Project. So, it’s not entirely without some symmetry that most people first learned about Twelve when it was a small Cyclotron Road project, Etosha Cave presented an enormously well-received talk at ABLC NEXT early on, and it’s been a company that just keeps making friends and winning admirers.

12. The FT technology partner for some time has been Emerging Fuels Technology, EFT, and among the challenges that the company faces on the journey to scale, quite a bit is falling on EFT’s shoulders.So, we’ll see them on the ABLC Next stage in a few weeks, and we’re looking forward to learning more. Until then, I’ll put Chopin’s Opus 12 on the palyer, remembering that Franz List said it was Chopin’s favorite of all his works.. “The tone, though small, was absolutely beyond criticism, and although his execution was not forcible, nor by any means fitted for the concert room, still it was perfect in the extreme,” Liszt later wrote. Small, yes, variations brilliantes, indeed. Will it go? Well, Reactor B did, so let’s assume an attitude of hope and confidence. READ MORE

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