An Integrated, Multi-Scale Microbial Gas Fermentation Platform for Recycling Waste and Low Cost Resources to Valuable Commodities

LanzaTech has developed a novel technology platform that sustainably recycles carbon from abundant, low cost waste resources into valuable commodities. The feedstock flexible process converts waste gas containing carbon monoxide (CO) or CO₂ (e.g. from industrial sources like steel mills and processing plants) or syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g. municipal solid waste, organic industrial waste, or agricultural waste) into a diverse range of fuels and chemicals.

The highly integrated platform LanzaTech has developed offers an innovative biosynthesis approach comprising a unique proprietary microbial chassis organism, an anaerobic strain engineering and selection platform, a discovery and analysis pipeline, a novel gas fermentation process and proprietary reactor designs that allow efficient mass transfer of gases and are scalable from lab bench to commercial scale. All aspects of the process are covered by ˃ 100 granted patents.  

At the heart of the process is a gas fermenting, acetogenic microbe Clostridium autoethanogenum, which is naturally occurring and categorized as a World Health Organization (WHO) Risk Level 1 organism (the same as baker’s yeast). The microbe acts as a biocatalyst which allows production of both fuels and chemicals from carbon-containing gas resources. The exceptional feedstock flexibility and metabolic diversity make LanzaTech’s gas fermenting microbe unique. The ability to utilize gases relies on unique redox chemistry and energy conservation mechanisms that are not possible in standard hosts such as E. coli or yeast. In addition, several novel enzymes and reaction mechanisms such as dehydrogenases and dehydratases have been identified.

The platform incorporates strain selection and strain engineering– a first for a gas fermentation microbe - and incudes a robust genetic toolbox comprising proprietary genome editing tools and genetic part library that had to be developed from scratch as these organisms were previously considered as genetically inaccessible. Building on a discovery and analysis platform that includes a full omics pipeline and on-line analytics, a first predictive metabolic model for a gas fermenting organism has been established that has been validated against and lab and real-world fermentation data. This has enabled the development of chassis strains with optimized production and multiple proprietary strains for synthesis of non-natural products via novel routes. We have demonstrated synthesis of over 25 new products from gas fermentation, including fuels such as ethanol or butanol and platform chemicals such as propanol or butanediol, a four-carbon alcohol that can be catalytically converted to bio butadiene.

Proprietary novel reactor designs and optimized process chemistry ensure efficient, continuous, single-pass gas conversion with a high selectivity to the product of interest. To date, this technology has been demonstrated with such diverse gas streams as by-product gases from steel making, reformed natural gas, and syngas produced from gasified biomass and gasified municipal solid waste. The company has scaled the process and successfully operated two 100,000 gallon/annum pre-commercial facilities at industrial sites as well as 4 additional demonstration sites with a total of more than 40,000 hours on stream.