Advanced BioFuels USA

by Keith Button (Aerospace America)  The air transport industry lacks enough suppliers of sustainable aviation fuel to meet the anticipated demand as airlines become more aggressive about reining in their carbon footprints and more travelers take to the air. Keith Button describes one company’s unique approach to meeting the demand.
The visuals aren’t attractive — a kind of bacteria found in rabbit intestines and gases from steel mills — but a sustainable aviation fuel made from these could prove very attractive to airlines in the coming months and years.

Most companies in the emerging field of SAFs make these synthetic kerosene fuels from used cooking oil, agriculture residue or other waste. The downside of those feedstocks is the variability of their composition, which reverberates through the production process. So, LanzaJet, a spinoff of LanzaTech of New Zealand, plans to start selling a SAF made indirectly from steel mill emissions, possibly as soon as next year.

If LanzaJet succeeds, its SAF, among the eight approved by regulators around the world, could help satisfy the growing demand among airlines for sustainable fuels. These fuels reduce the carbon footprint of air travel by tapping carbon that’s already in the environment, and they are increasingly sought after by airlines looking to reduce their climate impacts.

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STEEL MILL FLARE

The LanzaJet story starts in 2001 when British molecular biologist Sean Simpson moved to New Zealand from Japan to work for a forestry company. At the time, the United States and other nations were on a push to increase ethanol production as an additive for gasoline, and Simpson’s job was to research how wood might be efficiently turned into ethanol.

Simpson soon came to realize that wood wasn’t a viable feedstock for ethanol.

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Waste was cheap and available in large quantities, but they discovered that superheating the waste into gases as a precursor to renewable fuels delivered inconsistent results due to the material’s varied composition. Those gases had to then be converted to liquid fuel, and the results of that conversion, accomplished with the aid of metal catalysts, also produced inconsistent results. Simpson and Foster looked to bacteria as a possible solution, knowing that some strains could ingest a variable mix of gases and still consistently excrete ethanol that could be sold as a fuel additive or as a precursor to other products.

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They did some research and learned that carbon monoxide was the main ingredient (in steel mill flue gas), and that steel mills all over the world produced similar emissions: a plentiful and untapped potential feedstock.

Next, they looked for bacteria that would eat that carbon monoxide. 

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GOING COMMERCIAL

Simpson and Foster put their steel-gas-loving bacteria to work starting with a small pilot plant at the Glenbrook Steel Mill in 2008, which helped attract interest from Chinese venture capital investors.

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By 2018, LanzaTech was producing ethanol with bacteria at a full-scale rate at the Jingtang Steel Mill outside Beijing.

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LanzaTech added a second commercial-scale plant in China, and another plant is under construction in Haryana, India, where bacteria will turn oil refinery emissions into ethanol starting next year. Two more plants are under construction, one in Belgium and another at a ferro-alloy mill in China. Those are slated to begin making ethanol in 2022.

SAF POTENTIAL

The turning point toward SAF began after the arrival of new LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren. She had helped pioneer the production of the first SAFs that were tested and certified.

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It took 1.7 liters of ethanol to make a liter of this SAF, known officially as alcohol-to-jet synthetic paraffinic kerosene, ATJ-SPK. LanzaTech worked toward adapting the process to a commercial scale while also conducting demonstration flights with the fuel in 2018 and 2019.

The company won approval for this SAF in 2018, making the fuel the only one among the eight currently approved SAFs to be made from ethanol. 

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LanzaTech and Carbon Engineering of Squamish, British Columbia, aim to show how carbon dioxide can be pulled from the atmosphere and converted to carbon monoxide through electrolysis. The bacteria would eat the carbon monoxide and other compounds and excrete ethanol, which could then be converted to SAF, explains Freya Burton, LanzaTech’s chief sustainability and people officer. Hydrogen also could be supplied to the bacteria through electrolysis by splitting water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.  READ MORE