A factory on the outskirts of the American city of Chicago has devised a technology that allows microorganisms to recycle the greenhouse gases that they emit, converting them into ethanol, and from there to everyday products, such as bottles, household products, or even clothes.
Inside dozens of flasks in the laboratory of the “Lanza Tech” company in the suburbs of Chicago, a liquid is constantly boiling that contains billions of tiny bacteria that feed on gases for recycling.
Thanks to a technique developed in this lab, three factories are using these microorganisms to convert the greenhouse gas they emit into ethanol.
Then global brands use ethanol to make everyday products such as bottles, detergents, sweatpants and even dresses.
“I never imagined 14 years ago that we would put on the market short gowns made from steel mill emissions,” says Michael Copquet, who joined Lanzatec almost immediately after its founding.
LanzaTech is the only US company among the 15 that has qualified for the EarthChat Prize, created by Prince William to reward climate initiatives.
Since its launch, LanzaTech and its 200 employees claim to have prevented the emission of 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, producing about 190 million liters of ethanol instead.
For microbiologist Michael Koepke, this amount is “very small” compared to the quantities needed to combat climate change.
After it took 15 years to develop the technology and prove its effectiveness on a large scale, the goal now is to increase the number of factories that adopt it.
“We want to get to a point where we can use the carbon emitted from the earth,” says Kawkibi, rather than extracting more oil and gas.
Since bacteria can ingest carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the process is much “smooth” than “any other gas conversion technology,” says Zara Summers, vice president of science at LanzaTech.
It indicates that the raw material can be “waste” that turns into gas or “agricultural waste or gases emitted from any heavy industries.”
Various partnerships have made it possible to use these gases to produce detergents and two sets of dresses made of polyester with 20% of the gas captured.
And Summers believes that “mankind will always need carbon,” but “in the future, the idea is to benefit from it. (…) and instead of releasing it into the air, it is used to manufacture products.”
Aircraft fuel
Lanza Tech established a separate company, Lanza Jet, with the goal of using ethanol as an aviation fuel. Increasing global production of this fuel constitutes a major challenge for the sector that seeks to become “environmentally friendly”.
The company aims to produce around 3.8 billion cubic meters of fuel annually by 2030. Unlike bio-ethanol produced from wheat, beetroot or corn, ethanol produced from gas does not require the use of agricultural land.
LanzaTech’s next challenge is to commercialize bacteria that produce gases other than ethanol. Thousands of species are subject to testing in the company’s laboratories.
“We have proven that we can produce more than 100 chemicals,” says Michael Koepke.
He is very enthusiastic about an idea still in development centered around converting gases directly into ethylene, which is “the most widely used chemical product in the world” (for bottles, wrappers…). Ethylene production currently emits almost as much carbon dioxide as aviation.
Currently, the ethanol produced by Lanza Tech must be converted to polyethylene, but this stage can be skipped and thus save more energy.
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