Photo: Twelve
It took the 1970s oil crisis for Brazilian dictators to impose ethanol as a way of avoiding oil dependency. Although the idea was relatively popular, other countries still debate if using crops makes sense, leading to second-generation ethanol – still too expensive to sell. What if we can make ethanol from the air? Twelve and LanzaTech are proposing that.
The two startups are joining forces to make that feasible. Twelve develop what it calls a “carbon transformation technology.” Without going too deep on how it does that on its website, the company states its technology is industrial photosynthesis.
Both processes use energy and water to create their products. While plants make their food through photosynthesis, Twelve makes fuels and “critical chemicals.” Among these chemicals is carbon monoxide. That’s where LanzaTech joins this equation.
This other startup created something called CSTR (Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor). With CO, this equipment produces ethanol. In other words, it cuts the middleman in ethanol production. To be more precise, LanzaTech gets rid of the “middle plant” that would have to be grown to be transformed into ethanol. That nowadays happens either by producing a juice that will be fermented to create ethanol – with sugarcane, cork, or beets – or as biomass that enzymes will turn into that juice to be fermented.
On paper, that looks almost surreal. If it was that easy to make ethanol, combustion engines could have survived for much more time by beating concerns with CO2 emissions. After all, these companies are carbon negative: they extract the carbon they need from the atmosphere, just like plants do.
Although combustion engines are still highly inefficient and dirty, they would have probably survived for more time if affordable synthetic ethanol had been revealed earlier. We must stress that this would only be the case while concerns were restricted to climate change and not to the lives of people submitted to all other pollutants produced by the combustion process.
The technical possibility of extracting carbon from the air is not new: that was already made multiple times. The big question here is if that can be made at competitive costs. Producing ethanol and other fuels this way has always been more expensive than just crushing sugar cane and adding yeast to that juice for the fermentation process.
If the union of Twelve’s and LanzaTech’s technologies made ethanol production economically feasible, that could be a way to produce renewable fuels to the machines that still cannot do without combustion engines. With additives, ethanol can be used in diesel engines, for example. Burning something renewable will always be better than using fossil fuels.
The issue is producing ethanol to power passenger cars. If that’s the idea, EVs are a much more efficient option for using the renewable energy Twelve needs for its industrial photosynthesis. If there is enough copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt for all the necessary batteries, it is a no-brainer. The recent price hikes due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine show we cannot take anything for granted.
Both processes use energy and water to create their products. While plants make their food through photosynthesis, Twelve makes fuels and “critical chemicals.” Among these chemicals is carbon monoxide. That’s where LanzaTech joins this equation.
This other startup created something called CSTR (Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor). With CO, this equipment produces ethanol. In other words, it cuts the middleman in ethanol production. To be more precise, LanzaTech gets rid of the “middle plant” that would have to be grown to be transformed into ethanol. That nowadays happens either by producing a juice that will be fermented to create ethanol – with sugarcane, cork, or beets – or as biomass that enzymes will turn into that juice to be fermented.
On paper, that looks almost surreal. If it was that easy to make ethanol, combustion engines could have survived for much more time by beating concerns with CO2 emissions. After all, these companies are carbon negative: they extract the carbon they need from the atmosphere, just like plants do.
Although combustion engines are still highly inefficient and dirty, they would have probably survived for more time if affordable synthetic ethanol had been revealed earlier. We must stress that this would only be the case while concerns were restricted to climate change and not to the lives of people submitted to all other pollutants produced by the combustion process.
The technical possibility of extracting carbon from the air is not new: that was already made multiple times. The big question here is if that can be made at competitive costs. Producing ethanol and other fuels this way has always been more expensive than just crushing sugar cane and adding yeast to that juice for the fermentation process.
If the union of Twelve’s and LanzaTech’s technologies made ethanol production economically feasible, that could be a way to produce renewable fuels to the machines that still cannot do without combustion engines. With additives, ethanol can be used in diesel engines, for example. Burning something renewable will always be better than using fossil fuels.
The issue is producing ethanol to power passenger cars. If that’s the idea, EVs are a much more efficient option for using the renewable energy Twelve needs for its industrial photosynthesis. If there is enough copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt for all the necessary batteries, it is a no-brainer. The recent price hikes due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine show we cannot take anything for granted.
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