(138f) High-Selectivity, Gas Fermentation of CO2 to Ethanol

LanzaTech has developed a fully integrated, platform for commercial-scale production of fuels and chemicals from sustainable biomass and waste feedstocks. The platform comprises of a highly-optimized, gas-utilizing host organism, an advanced strain engineering and process optimization pipeline, validated metabolic and process models, and scalable reactor designs with demonstrated performance.

LanzaTech’s innovative gas fermentation platform can capture and utilize CO₂, H₂ and CO for the production of fuels and chemicals. The ability of the fermentation platform to utilize gas mixtures of varying compositions enables the use of a diverse range of feedstocks, including syngas generated from agricultural residues or municipal solid waste and waste gases from industrial sources (e.g. refineries and steel mills).

Refinery waste gases which are primarily composed of H₂ and CO­₂ offer an opportunity to convert CO₂ into products directly from low value gas streams while reducing CO₂ and air emissions at the refinery site. Furthermore, the ethanol gas fermentation pathway exhibits a high selectivity which significantly exceeds the selectivity of catalytic pathways for conversion of CO₂, H₂ and CO. This ability of the LanzaTech gas fermentation platform to selectively produce ethanol from dilute refinery waste gases provides the next step in the drive to increase efficiency and reduce waste in the refinery setting.

Production of over 30 molecules has been demonstrated, adding value to carbon emissions and highlighting the opportunities that exist through carbon capture and utilization technologies.

Proprietary, scalable reactor designs and optimized process chemistry, ensure efficient, continuous, single-pass gas conversion with a high selectivity to the product of interest. The process has been successfully scaled up from the laboratory bench through in-lab and in-field pilot plants to fully integrated 100,000-gallon/year pre-commercial demonstration plants with a total of over 55,000 hours on stream. First full commercial units are in construction in US, Europe and Asia.

Carbon utilization technologies such as LanzaTech’s offer both feedstock holders a path to add value, and chemical users a path to off take large volumes of recycled carbon products.