Rapid population growth and climate change are posing some of the most urgent challenges to mankind and have intensified the need for low-cost manufacturing of fuels, chemical-building blocks, materials and food from sustainable resources. Gas fermentation using autotrophic microorganisms offers a sustainable path to these products from a range of local, highly abundant, waste and low-cost resources. LanzaTech has pioneered a gas fermentation process using anaerobic acetogenic microbes capable of fixing carbon oxides. While 10 years ago, acetogens were considered genetically inaccessible and mass-transfer of gases was considered a major scale up hurdle, LanzaTech has since developed a suite of synthetic biology tools successfully scaled up the process from the laboratory bench to full commercial scale. In May 2018, LanzaTech successfully started up a world-first commercial scale (48k MTA) gas fermentation plant using emissions from the steel making process as feedstock for ethanol production. The technology has been demonstrated with a diverse range of additional low-cost feedstocks including waste gases from other industrial sources (e.g., processing plants or refineries) or syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g., unsorted and non-recyclable municipal solid waste, agricultural waste, or organic industrial waste) and additional plants are under construction. In order to maximize the value that can be added to the array of gas resources that the process can use as an input, LanzaTech has established a unique biofoundry that enables automated strain engineering of anaerobic organisms and strain screening in context of flammable and toxic CO and H2 gases. Through this platform, LanzaTech has demonstrated direct production over 50 different products from gas. Several of these products have been scaled up to pilot scale and developed for commercial rollout.

Commercial scale production of low carbon fuels and chemicals from waste gases

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.