Commercial Scale Production of Fuels and Chemicals from Waste and Low Cost Resources via an Integrated, Multi-Scale Gas-Fermentation Platform

LanzaTech has developed novel gas fermentation technology that capture and utilize greenhouse gases for production of fuels and chemicals. In contrast to traditional fermentation that use sugars as substrate (and releases CO₂ as byproduct), gas fermentation utilizes C1 substrates carbon monoxide (CO) or CO₂. This enables a diverse range of feedstock options including waste gases from industrial sources (e.g., steel mills and processing plants) or syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g., agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, or organic industrial waste). Biomass is thence gasified, allowing for maximum yields and complete carbon utilization including the recalcitrant lignocellulosic fraction that cannot be utilized in traditional sugar fermentation.

At the heart of the technology is an acetogenic microbe capable of autotrophic growth. While the potential of acetogens have been recognized for decades, development has been severely limited by the challenging nature of these organisms and the lack of genetic tools. Since its inception in 2005, LanzaTech has evolved a strain of Clostridium autoethanogenum for fast autotrophic growth and developed robust strain engineering and Synthetic Biology tools including several genome editing methods, libraries of validated genetic parts, design algorithms, a validated genome scale model, and automated strain engineering workflows.

Using this platform, production of over 25 new molecules have been demonstrated from gas, in several cases exceeding reported production rates and yields of native producers engineered E. coli or yeast strains. Proprietary, scalable reactor designs and optimized process chemistry, ensure efficient, continuous, single-pass gas conversion with a high selectivity to the product of interest. The process has been successfully scaled up from the laboratory bench to fully integrated 100,000-gallon/year pre-commercial demonstration plants with a total of over 40,000 hours on stream. Currently, LanzaTech is constructing first commercial plants with partner ArcelorMittal in Belgium, Shougang Steel in China and China Steel in Taiwan.