“Despite talking about reduction in carbon emissions for last 30 years, we continue to put more carbon in the air year over year such that the curve keeps rising. This is something that we absolutely must change and I know you in India, just like us in the United States are seeing the impacts already. There is no single solution but a community of solutions.” says Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, Chief Executive Officer, LanzaTech.

Holmgren spoke as a keynote speaker for the first leadership series on ‘Leading Value Chain Sustainability through Carbon Transformation – Novel Approaches and Building Blocks’ organized by  Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on September 28, 2022.

“We have developed disruptive solution where fundamentally we change both fermentation as well as how materials are produced. We used fermentation for conversion of sugar into ethanol with yeast. This is done in a big batch reactor. So we take gases, hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and we convert them to ethanol. This is done in a continuous process in a bioreactor where we can use industrial gases, for example, carbon monoxide at a steel mill, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide at a refinery and classified solids like municipal solid waste or agri residues,” added Dr. Holmgren.

In conversation with Rupark Sarswat, Chief Executive Officer, India Glycol Limited who moderated the show, Holmgren provided a peek into the unique R&D initiatives being undertaken by the company.

“We need to continue to make sure we don’t put carbon in the air. And so the taking back of the fuels, either through technical approach or through natural solutions like trees, really is a way to recycle the carbon. We are using ethanol to make things like polyethylene or polyester as it becomes increasingly important to put them back in the cycle through something like gasification or pyrolysis, enabling us to really close the loop. This is the future we imagine. This is our first commercial facility operating in China. It takes a steel mill gas and converts it to ethanol, literally a steel mill gas which is rich in carbon monoxide 40 to 60% that would normally go out,” Dr. Holmgren said.

As per Dr. Holmgren, process technologies cannot be scaled in a matter of weeks or years. She explains: “It takes 15 to 30 years to get to scale. All of our work is sustainable biomaterials certified. This first plant in China is RSB certified and we now have a second and a third plant operating. These systems were using biology which is ideally suited to complex systems, and the reason I say that is because, like us, biology is able to handle chaotic inputs. Just like you can see what’s on the road ahead of you as you drive and interpolate to decide where your car should go, the reality is that organisms can also do this. The thermal catalysis requires very well defined systems and gas inputs, but for biology that is not the case. Our genetically modified organism can use, for example, carbon monoxide and it makes its own hydrogen through water gas shift. So that means a variability in the carbon hydrogen ratio. It is okay as as you process something like municipal solid waste where sometimes you are processing plastics and other times you are processing biomask. The intrinsic carbon hydrogen ratio of those two materials is quite different. This is not something you could ever do with a thermal catalyst, and this is why biology is suited for waste resources, because these are so variable.”

Explaining the technology, she said: “We have developed the entire genetic toolkit that allows us to take our gas eating microbes and modify it and we modify it in an anaerobic bio foundry where we can literally make thousands of strains. We are working with Michael Jewitt at North Western National Lab and what he is working on is actually sell free proteins where you are actually modifying not the micro, but the enzymes in virtual rather than in vivo, and that takes you just another scale of genetic modification, an ability to tailor the internals of an organism.”

“I would also say biocatalyst has a nice advantage when it comes to poisons if you have a living system versus a system that is a fixed catalyst system. You can see that the addition of a poison reduces activity, and it’s seldom that you can bring it back without replacing that catalyst or regenerated an having the regeneration equipment in situ. What you can do with biology however, is once you fix whatever problem is causing the inhibition, you are in fact able to go back and get your performance back. The inhibition reduces performance and then the system recovers,” Dr. Holmgren added further.

“We need to be able to do all of this with limited resources at site and laboratory scale, but on the pilot scale you are looking here at our ability to make isopropanol and acetone with continuous operation. Continuous operation is important because this means the organism is not rejecting the genetic material, just like when you have surgery that adds something into your system. Rejecting that is important and you want to make sure that you are not rejecting the genetic material, just like we want to make sure that humans don’t reject an organ that is introduced into the system. This is all work that we have done with partners such as Department of Energy and North Western National Lab in USA.”

Talking about LanzaTech’s long wait to develop the technology, Dr. Holmgren informed: “I think it’s  important to talk about patience and financing as we have taken 17 years. You really cannot skip steps. Technology, as you know, requires you to really learn how to scale, and this is why a lot of people will say that what is happening is that we are crossing the value of death in going from R& D all the way through with our firstcommercial plant. Each consecutive size takes more money and so it is a journey both of time and capital intensity to get your first commercial product.”  

“We continue to publish our work because we believe that success and bending the carbon curve will not happen if only Lanzatech is successful, but you can imagine a future where waste gases or waste solids like agri-residues are converted to ethanol, but where someday in the same plan, you will be able to make other products directly. And this is really important in our fight to capture carbon and products and to continue to use steel that’s in the ground, not just to make one product, as ethanol is a building block to make all the things in our daily lives,” Dr. Holmgren said, defining the motivation.