This Start-Up Turns Pollution from Factories into Fuel That Powers Cars — and One Day Planes
by Catherine Clifford (CNBC) A bacteria found in the gut of a rabbit can now help cars run in a more eco-friendly way. The bacteria, identified by biotech start-up LanzaTech, helps turn factory carbon emissions, a.k.a. pollution, into ethanol ….
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“While there are many sustainable sources of sugar-derived ethanol … it’s not enough to substitute for all the fuel we use today,” says Holmgren (Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech). “Enter gas fermentation.”
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The Chicago-based company discovered a way to make ethanol from the carbon waste emissions secreted by factories — the exhaust you can see billowing out of their smoke stacks.
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The method uses the rabbit-gut bacteria to ferment the waste gas from factories, which then generates ethanol. So gas fermentation to produce ethanol can not only help solve the land issue, according to LanzaTech, it also tackles another problem: pollution.
The process is “a lot like making beer, except that instead of converting sugar to ethanol we convert pollution to ethanol,” Holmgren says. “We are reducing waste gas emissions at the same time, preventing these from becoming pollution.”
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Early testing is promising, though. The carbon footprint of the jet fuel made with LanzaTech’s technology shows a 70 percent reduction in carbon compared with jet fuel made from fossil fuel, Holmgren tells CNBC Make It.
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“We want you to be able to go into a store and choose — just like you choose fair-trade coffee — I want you to choose the carpet that comes from recycled carbon versus the carpet that comes from the fresh fossil carbon,” she says.
“We want all of you to ask for these products. I don’t want these [products] to come from fresh fossil, and that’s what we’re really trying to do.”
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As of May 3, LanzaTech’s gas fermentation technology is operating at commercial scale: A portion of the waste emissions from the Shougang Group’s Jingtang Steel Mill outside Beijing in Caofeidian, China, is being used to produce ethanol in what is being called the Shougang-LanzaTech Joint Venture. The facility will produce 16 million gallons of ethanol a year. The reduced emissions coming from the plant as a result of LanzaTech’s technology is the equivalent of taking 80,000 cars off the road every year.
Though a significant step for the company, that’s a relatively tiny impact.
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LanzaTech has plans for its technology to be implemented at four other commercial plants in coming years: the Indian Oil Company at the Panipat Refinery in Haryana, India, in 2019 (forecast to produce 11 million gallons of ethanol per year and displace emissions equivalent of taking 50,000 cars off the road each year); Aemetis biotechnology company’s Riverbank, California, location in 2019 (forecast to produce 12 million gallons of ethanol per year and displace emissions equivalent of taking just over 50,000 cars off the road each year); Swayana energy project developer in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa in 2019 (forecast to produce 17 million gallons of ethanol per year and displace emissions equivalent of taking just over 80,000 cars off the road each year) and ArcelorMittal steel and mining company in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020 (forecast to produce 21 million gallons of ethanol per year and displace emissions equivalent of taking 100,000 cars off the road each year). READ MORE WATCH VIDEO
