| Project Detail |
A robust and sustainable bioeconomy can only be realized through the industrial-scale, carbon-neutral synthesis of fuels, chemicals, and materials. Biofuels, along with a growing number of other sustainable products, are made almost exclusively via fermentation, the age-old technology used to produce foods such as wine, beer, and cheese. Current commercial methods to produce ethanol biofuel from sugar or starches waste more than 30% of the carbon in the feedstock as carbon dioxide (CO2) in the fermentation step alone. This waste limits product yields and squanders valuable feedstock carbon as greenhouse gas CO2. Preventing the loss of carbon as CO2 during bioconversion, or directly incorporating external CO2 as a feedstock into bioconversions, would revolutionize bioprocessing by increasing the product yield per unit of carbon input by more than 50%.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
LanzaTech will create transformative technology to directly convert CO2 to ethanol at 100% carbon efficiency with technical assistance from the University of Michigan and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team will develop a novel biocatalyst that leverages affordable, renewable hydrogen (H2) to capture and fix CO2 directly into ethanol, a biofuel and feedstock for valuable products. The core inputs are carbon-free renewable energy, water, and CO2. The alcohol-to-jet process developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and LanzaTech Gas fermentation can leverage renewable H2 to potentially convert the approximately 50 million tonnes of CO2 emitted by U.S. corn ethanol production annually to chemical feedstocks and subsequently to sustainable aviation fuel. The carbon-optimized conversion technology developed under this project can be integrated with multiple CO2 sources, such as grain ethanol refining in the near term and direct air capture in the mid-long term. |
