Sustainable Aviation Fuel: LanzaTech touts pollution-to-fuel vision
Lanzatech CEO Jennifer Holmgren tells the Net Zero Festival how a combination of advanced technology and biology can turn captured pollution into green jet fuel
Carbon from captured from industrial plants could power the world’s aviation industry, according to Dr Jennifer Holmgren, chief executive of carbon recycling firm LanzaTech.
While the 20 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced annually is dwarfed by the 100 billion gallons of conventional jet fuel used globally each year, Holmgren said technologies capable of producing low carbon alternatives to kerosene would grow exponentially over the coming decade, as long as sustainable feedstocks can be secured.
“What we need to do is find feedstocks, find approaches that allow us to this level of scale quickly,” she explained. “And I believe that level of limitless feedstock can only be found in one place: pollution.”
Speaking as part of the Net Zero Festival today, Holmgren said that extracting carbon from the atmosphere or industrial plants could be converted into ethanol by utilising a natural organism to ferment the carbon into a useful substance, enabling manufacturers to then use the ethanol in the manufacture of clothes, household cleaning products, and packaging, as well as fuels.
“There is so much carbon that already goes above ground, goes out at as plume or [which is] is literally trash and all that carbon needs to be converted into the things that we use every day,” she said. “I would argue, to really succeed, we also need to turn the [excess] CO2 in our atmosphere into the products we use every day. That’s especially important if we want to continue to fly because, at the end of the day, as soon as you put fuel into an aeroplane, as soon as it combusts, you have CO2 emissions.”
At the event, Holmgren pointed to a working refinery at a steel mill in China where ethanol is already being produced from the facility’s emissions as evidence it is technically possible to deploy captured carbon as a fuel feedstock. A Virgin Atlantic flight from Orlando to London Gatwick has also been powered by an ethanol-derived fuel, she said.
“It is imperative that we work out how to convert CO2,” she said. “If you think that sounds like science fiction, it’s actually not impossible.”
You can still sign up to catch sessions at this week’s Net Zero Festival both live and on demand.
