LanzaTech Converts Carbon into Ethanol, Acetone/IPA
LanzaTech and carbon technology firm Twelve have created ethanol from CO2 emissions as part of an ongoing research and development partnership. The process uses Twelve’s carbon transformation technology and LanzaTech’s small continuous stirred tank reactor in an approach that the companies said is highly scalable to industrial quantities, while simultaneously eliminating CO2 emissions.
“Our partnership with Twelve provides us with the feedstock needed to create critical resources like ethanol without adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Our process aims to rebalance the overabundance of carbon in our environment and instead reuse it for meaningful applications,” said LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren.
In a separate development, LanzaTech researchers, together with their counterparts at Northwestern University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have created a new gas fermentation process using C. auto to convert waste gases, such as emissions from heavy industry or syngas generated from a biomass source, into either isopropyl alcohol (IPA) or acetone.
The partners reprogrammed LanzaTech’s commercial ethanol-producing bacterial strain through the use of synthetic biology tools, including combinatorial DNA libraries and cell-free prototyping advanced modeling, and omics.
The optimized process has been scaled up to the pilot plant. “Conversion pathways for the production of any biofuel or bioproduct, including acetone and IPA, inevitably involve chemical byproducts that can cause or be the result of major bottlenecks,” said Tim Tschaplinski, section head for biodesign & systems biology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We used advanced proteomics and metabolomics to identify and overcome these bottlenecks for a highly efficient pathway. This approach can be applied to create streamlined processes for other chemicals of interest.”
According to a life cycle analysis, the technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 160% compared with using fossil fuels.
“Acetone and IPA are two examples with a combined global market of $10 billion. The acetone and IPA pathways and tools developed will accelerate the development of other new products by closing the carbon cycle for their use in multiple industries,” Holmgren said.
Author: Elaine Burridge, Freelance Journalist
