Production of sustainable fuels and chemicals from waste gas streams

One of the key challenges facing the global community over the next decades is to increase the sources of sustainable forms of energy and platform chemicals in order to safeguard the environment, while ensuring that it does not have a detrimentally impact food supplies. Internationally, governments have already been mandating the increased use of renewable fuels in the transport sector. Similarly, as a result of consumer driven demand, the global market for more environmentally sustainable alternatives to today’s oil and coal-derived chemicals is anticipated to exceed $100 billion by 2020.

LanzaTech has developed a complete process platform to allow the continuous biological production of fuels and platform chemicals from gases. To date, this technology has been demonstrated with such diverse gas streams as by-product gases from steel making, reformed natural gas, and syngas produced from gasified biomass or municipal solid waste. The company has successfully operated two 100,000 gal/year pre-commercial facilities.

At the core of the LanzaTech process is a proprietary strain of Clostridium autoethanogenum for which we have developed and established a genetic toolbox including gene knockout and integration methods and genetic part libraries as well as a metabolic model to allow the carbon an energy consumed by its proprietary gas fermenting microbe to be channeled in to a spectrum of valuable chemicals. LanzaTech has demonstrated synthesis of an array of over 20 products from gas fermentation, including fuels ethanol or butanol and chemicals 2,3-butanediol, succinic acid, acetone or isopropanol via existing and completely novel routes.