They Might Be Giants, the Story of Syngas Fermentation

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September 03, 2024

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... They called it “the technology that dare not speak its name” because it was too crazy risky, when they did not call it “the technology that could not scale” between the guffaws in many board rooms. After the laughter subsided, after the catcalls and the tech-shaming, those who stayed to learn, usually came away impressed. Many invested in three companies — then, LanzaTech, Coskata and Ineos Bio and later LanzaTech, Synata Bio and Jupeng Bio. The technology landscape is littered with good ideas that did not work out, but are three are still there.

I’ve known Mark Niederschulte, Jupeng Bio’s CEO, for about 15 years more or less, and we had a chance several months ago to have a long, off-the-record conversation about the story of syngas fermentation, and in recent days we had another one, shorter, for the record, in which we reached all the way back to 1989 and forward to today. It’s a bright story, and not only for those who cheered the LanzaTech IPO and the several successful scale-ups and the many products demonstrated by the LanzaTech organism portfolio. There’s far more here. I am looking forward to hosting Jennifer Holmgren, Tim Cesarek and Mark Niederschulte on the ABLC state at the end of next month. Consider this column a down payment on the exploration into this technology platform and its success to date and opportunity ahead.

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Mark Niederschulte

I’ve been at this since July of 2006 when I got into this area at BP. BP’s goal in renewables at the time was “what is the gain relative to emissions?” So, it Then, when we got sold to INEOS, now we were part of a private company that prioritized making money as well as addressing emissions. So, the perspective changed because the question changed, but not the outcome, or even some of the challenges that even existed back then. Such as, thinking of a carbon emission as a form of disposing of waste carbon, if you wish to dispose of it by converting it into a useful product that offsets the use of new fossil carbon, it typically requires hydrogen. If you are trying to minimize the carbon footprint, you need green hydrogen? So, where are you going to get affordable green hydrogen?

Back then, if you brought up electrolysis, they’d go, “yeah, right, no one’s going to pay, you a market price that’s 10 times fossil price, for hydrogen. So that’ll never be a viable carbon disposal method.”

So, that’s how biomass gasification came to dominate, not only from a desire to more productively use biomass.

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The syngas we could make from biomass was a little carbon monoxide dominant, but it’s got enough hydrogen in it so that the fermentation worked and we could make ethanol and single cell protein. And that was 100% green in the eyes of all the green groups, at that time.

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China is the king of waste gases, because they have syngas everywhere. Yes, INEOS had refineries and chemical plants, but it’s nothing like China. So, so the business model and the feedstocks have continued to evolve.

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In 2004, I was managing the technology licensing and catalyst business for BP; we were the large world’s largest licensor of petrochemical technology. And they said, we want to get into renewables technology, so go find us somebody to talk to. So we looked at 324 companies around the world, just to figure out what would matter to BP. BP started with three principles. It has to be safe, it has to be reliable, most importantly, it has to be scalable. Because if it was a specialty chemical, or it makes little plants or something like that, because our emissions were so high, it wouldn’t do anything for BP

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They said “it’s okay if it’s not going to be a huge money maker, but it has to be a huge pollution reducer. It’s got to make a material difference.”

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Yes, the ability for it to be the used widely. Ideally, you convert a lot of carbon, and convert it in something people want to buy. And so when we found the syngas fermentation platform, it didn’t take too much effort to say, Okay, well, we know there’s a lot of CO around. And we know that if you make ethanol, you can do all kinds of things with ethanol, right? You can make ethylene out of it, and then you have polyethylene.

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Coskata was formed in 2006, Sean (Simpson) and Richard (Foster) had formed LanzaTech in 2005 and so they were a year old. Coskata was kind of new. And then (Jim) Gaddy, he started research on this in 1989 and by 2006 he had a 400 liter CSTR fermenter at pilot scale, which had been built in 2000 and the gasifier been added in 2003, so he had a fully integrated pilot plant, biomass in, ethanol out. He’d been running that, the fully integrated plant for three years, and the fermenter at pilot scale for six.

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We bought BRI July 1, 2008 and that was INEOS Bio. And we started the design of Vero Beach

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Eventually, we got the USDA grant, the USDA loan, and the Treasury renewable energy production grant, but it added a year to the timeline.

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The plant was mechanically complete in May 2012, and we made our first commercial production of ethanol in the big fermenter in 2013 and we spent a lot of the time in between, commissioning the unit, figuring out how to process biomass so they would work in the gasifier. Now, I was raised on a farm, so at least I was familiar with agricultural operations, but, man, moving around raw biomass and and shredding it and screening it and drying it and getting it into the into the biomass gasifier, that wasn’t something that was our sweet spot for sure. But, we got the right people in place, and that took a little while.

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Here. we had all the invasive species, too numerous to list, that they were always fighting in Florida, And, palm trees, which are tough. Also, Florida Power and Light brought us all their right-of-way, trimmings, stuff like that. Nothing we ever processed was the same by the day, sometimes by the hour. That was a challenge. And then, the torrential rain. It was difficult.

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The gasifier itself is pretty forgiving on size. It can take six inch long, sticks, things like that, but it couldn’t take the sand.

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The, we discovered the hydrogen cyanide. The fermenter would be running really well, and then it would die, and hydrogen cyanide has a very, very short half life. So if you took a gas sample and you analyzed it, it never showed up because it had it was long gone.

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But, turns out one of the heat exchangers was improperly manufactured and it failed.

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There was a German company who supplied our syngas compressor; we only had one of those because we thought it would be reliable enough not to be an issue. So, we shut down for maintenance after three years, they flew in from Germany, did the maintenance, we turned it back on, and the unit exploded.

So that was why we disappeared off the radar, ....

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So we took all that data, sat down with the vendors who supplied the equipment, and with Amec who did the design, construction and the after-startup support. We brought them on site, and we basically designed the second plant.

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But support for biofuels was waning. Fracking came in the US and now, you could build chemical plants off that low cost platform.

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In the fall of 2016 a hurricane hit Vero Beach, there was damage at the plant, and Jupeng said, we don’t want it, we want our plant in China.

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Shanxi is a high density industrial province; so, lots of vendors and highly qualified people chemical plant operations. That’s where we built the plant, and we turned it on in December of 2020. But it was the time of COVID and we had a heck of a time getting people into China to commission and start it up and help with operations. And that was, that’s that was pretty much painful through 2022.

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Once COVID hit, you had to quarantine, and you had a limit on how long you could stay, 90 days.

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One, our quarantine hotel actually had decent internet access, so I could do emails, and work on project documents most of the time, though it definitely slowed us down. Second, we’re really lucky as a company that we have people that have dedicated their life’s work life to seeing this technology be successful. It’s more than a job, it’s kind of a calling.

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The Vero Beach fermenter could make roughly 20,000 tons of ethanol, now that fermenter can make about 40 so we basically doubled the productivity. So we’ve also are now where we’re recovering the cell mass as single cell protein. And to give you a really rough approximation of cell mass, it’s roughly 20% of the ethanol production. At Shanxi Bio, we’re recovering the single cell protein for animal feed, aquaculture, and there are derivatives of single cell protein as higher value products.

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... we see a variation of 50% relative in the CO content. It can go down to 20%, then 30, and then 40, sometimes slowly, sometimes quick, and the ratio of CO and hydrogen is always changing. With biomass, it has a relatively consistent carbon to hydrogen ratio, and so you’d see variation based on how well you were able to stop the conversion at the CO and not go all the way to CO2. And, once we started the gasifier and it’s running, it’s only biomass going in. So the only way to adjust the conversion and to adjust, you know, so that you deal with wetter or drier feedstock is to convert more or less of the CO and hydrogen to CO2 and water. So, we have variations, but the carbon hydrogen balance was more or less consistent.

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... we said, look, here are the parameters we like to operate in. And if you go above these you stress the bacteria out. And we quite like our bacteria. We quite like them to think life is good and to just happily live and make ethanol. Don’t drink too much of it. Go to bed early, and, you know, reproduce and be happy. And if you go in these areas, we said, you’re going to stress them out, and they don’t want to be stressed out any more than you do.

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But, Dr Gaddy was a professor of chemical engineering. He told me this. “We figured out how to make the biology work and explain it to somebody that doesn’t have a microbiology degree, because chemical plant operators probably are not microbiologists.” His experience was all around safety, reliability, repeatability, you know, how are you going to keep something that, if you stop feeding and it dies, alive and stuff like that, ....

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Thirty-five years later, presto! Magic! Syngas fermentation has arrived. Plenty of waste gas out there, and waste biomass, in this world gone awry. So, plenty to work on. READ MORE

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