This Biotech Startup Is Making Palm Oil-Substitutes and Omega-3s from Carbon Emissions

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December 22, 2020

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by Kristin Toussaint (Fast Company) Instead of having more carbon go into the atmosphere, making our planet warmer and speeding up the effects of climate change, you might soon be able to eat those emissions. Biotech company LanzaTech has successfully turned CO2 emissions into lipids and omega-3 fatty acids as part of a pilot program in partnership with India’s Department of Biotechnology and oil and gas company IndianOil.

Lipids and omega-3s are the building blocks to many foods and fuels. By making them out of waste carbon, LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren says, there’s now an opportunity to make a multitude of products—from nutritional supplements to fish feed to vegetable oil replacements to diesel fuel—without using up resources like land and water, and while simultaneously preventing more emissions from being released into the air.

LanzaTech already has a commercial plant running in China that turns carbon emissions from a steel mill into ethanol, which is then used to make fuel. The company intentionally set out to find a way to convert waste carbon into lipids and omega-3s, says Holmgren, because of all the things those molecules could then be used for. By making omega-3s, “that means you’re using CO2 to make nutrition,” she says. Omega-3 fatty acids are found abundantly in fish, and making them from waste carbon could help address overfishing in our oceans.

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The process works by feeding waste carbon and hydrogen to organisms that digest them and turn them into acetate. From there, an algae that normally eats sugar but is able to eat acetate turns that acetate into the lipids and Omega-3s. “A lot of things that eat sugar also eat acetate,” Holmgren says of microorganisms in our natural world. “I like to tell people that means acetate is the new sugar, except it doesn’t take land or water or anything else.”

Turning CO2 into ethanol happens through fermentation—microbes eat the waste carbon and produce ethanol. To make lipids and Omega-3s, though, there needs to be a source of energy inside the reactors. “In a world where making hydrogen from natural gas, this is probably not the best process,” Holmgren admits. “In world where we’re starting to [use] renewable electricity and electrolysis, then you’re going to make all that hydrogen from green electrons.” As this technology scales, she says, it’ll use, and benefit from, the growing renewable energy capacity. READ MORE

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