S51: Production of Diesel Fuel via Fatty Acid Synthesis from Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide Feedstocks

There is increasing pressure to reduce dependence on foreign petroleum sources.  As such, the development of routes to produce fungible fuels from renewable and/or domestic feedstocks has been the focus of significant research.  Traditional bio-refining processes rely on microbial fermentation of renewable carbon sources such as sugar into higher value products.  More recently, work has focused on the use of non-traditional feedstocks in bio-processing such as cellulosic biomass, pyrolysis of waste biomass, or gasification of organic municipal solid waste, to name a few.  OPXBIO is developing an engineered microorganism that produces free fatty acids of targeted carbon chain length utilizing hydrogen (H₂) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) as a feedstock.  The free fatty acids are subsequently converted to alkanes and or jet fuel using chemical catalysis.  The proposed process will fix CO₂ utilizing H₂ to generate an infrastructure-compatible, energy-dense fuel.  The proposed process is scalable, the initial economics are favorable, and the liquid fuel can be used directly in the existing diesel infrastructure.