Commercial scale up of gas fermentation

LanzaTech has developed novel gas fermentation technology that captures and utilizes greenhouse gases for production of fuels and chemicals. In contrast to traditional fermentation that uses sugars as a substrate (and releases CO₂ as byproduct), gas fermentation utilizes C1 substrates carbon monoxide (CO) or CO₂. This enables a diverse range of feedstock options including waste gases from industrial sources (e.g., steel mills and processing plants) or syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g., agricultural waste, MSW, or organic industrial waste). Through biomass gasification maximum yields and complete carbon utilization can be realized, including access to the lignocellulosic fraction that cannot be leveraged in traditional sugar fermentation. Such feedstock flexibility and product diversification are important parts of ensuring favorable production economics for this breakthrough technology.

LanzaTech’s highly integrated platform comprises its proprietary microbial host, an anaerobic strain engineering and selection platform, validated metabolic and process models, proprietary reactor designs and optimized process chemistry that ensure efficient, continuous, single-pass gas conversion with high selectivity to the product of interest. The process has been successfully scaled up from the laboratory through in-field pilot plants to fully integrated 100,000-gallon/year pre-commercial demonstration plants with a total of over 40,000 hours on stream and such diverse gas streams as by-product gases from steel making and syngas produced from gasified biomass or MSW. Currently, LanzaTech is constructing first commercial plants with partner ArcelorMittal in Belgium, Shougang Steel in China and China Steel in Taiwan. Challenges scaling up such a first of its kind technology will be discussed.