Carbon recycling: Gas fermentation for fuel and chemical production

Currently a critical challenge is facing the global community: we have to increase our energy resources, but also minimize fossil carbon emissions to safeguard the environment while ensuring that food production and supply is not detrimentally impacted. In this regard, renewable sources of transport fuels are of increasing importance.

The production of biofuels and platform chemicals via gas fermentation is a rapidly developing technology for high volume, sustainable, production of fuels and chemicals that does not require food-based substrates as a feedstock. LanzaTech was founded in 2005 in New Zealand and has recently consolidated operations into the Chicago area. Over the last 10 years LanzaTech developed and scaled a complete process platform to allow the continuous biological production of fuels and an array of chemical intermediates from gases. To date, this technology has been successfully demonstrated with such diverse gas streams as by-product gases from steel making (RSB certified at scale), reformed natural gas, and syngas produced from gasified biomass and gasified municipal solid waste. Recent results from these plants will be discussed as well as other emerging opportunities.  

In summary, gas fermentation offers an efficient route to add much greater value to gas streams than established technologies, while also reducing greenhouse emissions and providing a strategically important alternative to food or farmed resources for domestic production of sustainable fuels and chemicals at an impactful scale.