SKOKIE, United States: In a lab at Lanza Tech on the outskirts of Chicago, a gray liquid bubbles away in dozens of pieces of glass.
The mixture contains billions of hungry bacteria, specialized to feed on polluted air – the first step in a recycling system that turns greenhouse gases into usable products.
Thanks to licensing agreements, LanzaTech’s novel microorganisms are already being put to commercial use by three Chinese factories, which are converting waste effluent into ethanol.
This ethanol is then used as a chemical building block for consumer goods such as plastic bottles, athletic wear and even clothing through tie-ins with major brands such as Zara and L’Oreal.
“I never would have imagined that 14 years later, we’d have a cocktail dress on the market that’s made of steel extrusions,” said microbiologist Michael Koepke, who joined LanzaTech a year after it was founded. .
LanzaTech is the only American company among 15 finalists for the EarthShot Prize, an award for contributions to the environment launched by Britain’s Prince William and broadcaster David Attenborough. Five winners will be announced on Friday.
To date, LanzaTech says it has kept 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while producing 50 million gallons (190 million liters) of ethanol.
That’s a small drop in the bucket when it comes to the actual amounts needed to combat climate change, Kopac admits.
But after spending 15 years developing the method and proving its large-scale feasibility, the company is now looking to expand its ambitions and increase the number of participating factories.
“We really want to get to a point where we only use above-ground carbon, and keep it in circulation,” Kopik says — in other words, avoid extracting new oil and gas.
Industrial partnership
LanzaTech, which employs about 200 people, compares its carbon recycling technology to a brewery – but instead of taking sugar and yeast to make beer, it uses carbon dioxide and bacteria to make ethanol.
The bacteria used in their process were identified decades ago in rabbit droppings.
Koepke said the company put him through industrial conditions to improve in those settings, “almost like an athlete we trained.”
The bacteria are shipped in freeze-dried powder form to corporate clients in China, who have giant versions of the vats in Chicago, several meters high.
Corporate clients who built these facilities would then reap the rewards of ethanol sales – as well as positive PR from removing pollution from their core businesses.
The client in China is a steel plant and two ferroalloy plants. Six other sites are under construction, including one for an ArcelorMittal plant in Belgium, and one with Indian Oil Co. in India.
Because the bacteria can digest CO2, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the process is extremely flexible, explains Zara Summers, LanzaTech’s vice president of science.
“We can take garbage, we can take biomass, we can take gas off an industrial plant,” said Summers, who worked for ExxonMobil for ten years.
Products already on the shelves include a line of clothing at Zara. Selling for about $90, they are made of polyester, 20 percent of which comes from captured gas.
“In the future, I think there’s no such thing as waste, because carbon can be recycled,” Summers said.
Sustainable aviation fuel
LanzaTech has also formed a separate company, LanzaJet, to use ethanol to make “sustainable aviation fuel,” or SAF.
Increasing global production of SAF is a major challenge for the refueling aviation sector, which is trying to green itself.
LanzaJet aims to produce one billion gallons of SAF annually in the United States by 2030.
Unlike bioethanol produced from wheat, sugar beets or corn, the greenhouse gas-emission fuel does not require the use of agricultural land.
For LanzaTech, the next challenge is to commercialize bacteria that will produce chemicals other than ethanol.
In particular, they have their sights set on producing ethylene directly, “one of the most widely used chemicals in the world,” per Kopke—thus saving the energy previously associated with converting ethanol to ethylene. .
