2018!
This start-up turns pollution from factories into fuel that powers cars — and one day planes
Published Fri, Jul 27 2018
Airplanes may soon fly using fuel made from pollution with this company’s...
A bacteria found in the gut of a rabbit can now help cars run in a more eco-friendly way.
The bacteria, identified by biotech start-up
LanzaTech, helps turn factory carbon emissions, a.k.a. pollution, into ethanol, an alcohol that is blended with gasoline to reduce the amount of fuel used by cars.
Almost every gallon of gasoline sold in the United States today is 10 percent ethanol, according to the
Renewable Fuels Association. But ethanol still has environmental implications. For example, there’s the food versus fuel debate. Ethanol is
typically made from corn, sugar cane or grasses, which take a lot of land to grow, acreage that some argue is needed to grow food.
“The world uses
50 million barrels per day of fossil fuels (that’s for cars, planes, boats). If we want to try to substitute a significant portion of that using sugars ... we would end up using all our landmass to make fuels versus growing crops to feed people,” Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech tells
CNBC Make It.
“While there are many sustainable sources of sugar-derived ethanol ... it’s not enough to substitute for all the fuel we use today,” says Holmgren. “Enter gas fermentation.”
Holmgren is referring to the revolutionary, and according to LanzaTech, greener, process of producing ethanol developed by the start-up. The Chicago-based company discovered a way to make ethanol from the carbon waste emissions secreted by factories — the exhaust you can see billowing out of their smoke stacks.
LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren with Richard Branson and the then CEO of Virgin Atlantic, Steve Ridgway, in front of Battersea Power Station in London in 2011 when LanzaTech and Virgin Atlantic announced their partnership.
Photo courtesy: Virgin Atlantic
The method uses the rabbit-gut bacteria to ferment the waste gas from factories, which then generates ethanol. So gas fermentation to produce ethanol can not only help solve the land issue, according to LanzaTech, it also tackles another problem: pollution.
The process is “a lot like making beer, except that instead of converting sugar to ethanol we convert pollution to ethanol,” Holmgren says. “We are reducing waste gas emissions at the same time, preventing these from becoming pollution.”
The resulting ethanol can currently be mixed with gasoline for use in cars, and eventually, with airplane fuel.
In fact, Virgin Atlantic, the airline arm of the Virgin empire founded by billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson, has been working with LanzaTech since 2011, according to a 2016 blog post written by Branson. The goal of the partnership is to produce jet fuel made from carbon waste gases.
“This is a real game changer for aviation and could significantly reduce the industry’s reliance on oil within our lifetime. … The future potential of this technology is enormous,”
says Branson in his blog post.
Virgin Atlantic (of which
Branson sold a 31 percent stake to Air France-KLM for 220 million pounds in 2017) will fly a plane with LanzaTech fuel “very soon,” says a spokesperson for the airline.