By converting the by-products of steel production into ethanol, LanzaTech's new technology could revolutionize our global energy future.
The world is currently facing three critical energy needs. We need to: 1) supply sufficient and secure sources of energy to enable the global energy pool to double over the next 40 to 50 years; 2) introduce a greater-than-30-per-cent share of non-carbon emitting fuels into that pool to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels; and 3) ensure that, through this growth, we achieve energy democratization, enabling everyone access to clean, affordable energy without negatively impacting food, land, or water resources.To achieve the latter goal, it is critical that we diversify our primary energy sources. During the next 20 years, global energy demand is expected to grow by more than 40 per cent. The International Energy Agency projects that, during the same time period, fossil fuels will still supply more than 75 per cent of energy. This immense challenge is also an important opportunity.
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Governments throughout the world have reacted to predictions about the impact of greenhouse-gas mediated climate change, and the fluctuating price and demand for oil, by legislating increasingly aggressive mandates for the use of environmentally sustainable fuels and reduced fossil-fuel emissions. Increased biofuel development across the world, however, could have a significant impact on agricultural commodity markets given that current technologies rely on food or farmed resources for feedstocks.
Of increasing strategic importance globally is the ability to offer low-carbon fuel production locally as a means to create energy security without consuming food or farmed resources that would threaten food security. LanzaTech, a New Zealand company founded in 2005, has developed a unique technology that is able to address both needs in virtually every nation on earth.
LanzaTech offers a fully integrated sustainable fuels and chemicals platform that uses local, highly abundant waste and low-cost resources to produce fuel-grade ethanol. The patented process uses a microbe to convert gas (which is rich in climate-change causing CO and CO2) into fuels and chemicals. The gases that are used to produce this clean-energy source are low-cost, readily available resources such as industrial flue gases from steel mills and processing plants; syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g. MSW, organic industrial waste, agricultural waste); coal-derived syngas; and steam-reformed methane.
In fact, some of the waste resources that the process utilizes are by-products of industrial growth – resources that are expanding in emerging regions, which is where energy demand is growing most quickly. Interestingly, by integrating the technology into a number of industrial facilities (such as steel mills), mill owners can reduce their carbon footprint while producing a transportation fuel and maintaining industrial growth and employment for the region.
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LanzaTech was able to demonstrate the technology at scale at a pilot plant in New Zealand, where gas produced by the steel-making process was fed to microbes, which then produced fuel-grade ethanol.
LanzaTech’s technology is also well-suited for integration into waste biomass and municipal waste-gasification approaches, which can be deployed in rural areas to provide heat, power, and transportation fuels.
By using these readily available waste resources, LanzaTech’s process provides a strategically important route to eliminating the controversial food-versus-fuel issue associated with traditional biofuel (notably ethanol) production. To be able to produce fuels and chemicals from non-food feedstocks and, at the same time, mitigate reliance on petrochemicals and fossil fuels has huge ramifications for industries around the world that are seeking to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions and find ways to make their processes more economic.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the technology enables energy partnerships between industrial sectors that were previously mutually exclusive (i.e. steel producers and petroleum refiners), as the technology enables industrial-waste streams to be converted to transportation fuels (i.e. ethanol).
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LanzaTech’s first target market is China. However, there are a number of opportunities to extend the customer base to India, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Because China produces 50 per cent of the world’s steel, and already has ethanol mandates in many of its provinces, it is a natural first market for LanzaTech’s technology. Most importantly, China is keenly aware of the importance of producing fuels without impacting the food supply, something for which LanzaTech’s technology is ideally suited. Most of the steel mills in China that are producing this ethanol are in large industrial centres that are highly populated and provide a local market for the ethanol product, such that the product does not have to be shipped elsewhere. This effectively lowers the total cost of production of this alternative fuel.
LanzaTech estimates that 65 per cent of steel mills worldwide are using technology that could be retrofitted with the LanzaTech Process. The process could potentially be used to produce nearly 11 billion gallons of ethanol from gases off steel mills in China alone. Worldwide, nearly 30 billion gallons of ethanol could be produced through waste gases from steel mills using LanzaTech’s process, which has a significant impact on the global fuel pool.
LanzaTech is at the forefront of a new refining-industry sector. Since 2010, it has signed agreements with key feedstock suppliers and distribution partners across Asia, with a total of seven Global Fortune 500 companies partnering with it across multiple sectors. This approach will enable LanzaTech to develop multiple commercial facilities in parallel and rapidly become not only a global energy leader, but also a key part of global efforts to shift away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels.
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Source: the Mark
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