The Chicago-based startup company LanzaTech has successfully transformed greenhouse gas emissions into chemicals and fuels. The company is now ready to bring this innovative technology to market.
Founded in 2005, LanzaTech sells technology that converts greenhouse gas emissions from steel mills and other industrial facilities into ethanol, a renewable fuel and chemical feedstock. The process allows customers to turn their carbon pollution into products like jet fuel and the chemical building blocks for plastics. LanzaTech is also looking beyond transport fuels to the petrochemicals industry, where fossil fuels are turned into plastics and other chemicals.
Green alternatives like the ones being pioneered by LanzaTech will be crucial in the coming years to satisfy the world’s growing appetite to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent against climate change.By creating a use for the waste gas emitted from industrial facilities, it gives companies more incentive to capture the emissions driving global warming.
Today, the LanzaTech method is producing commercial quantities of ethanol from emissions captured at the Jingtang Steel Mill in northeastern China and steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal is set to build a LanzaTech system at a steel mill in Ghent, Belgium soon.There are also plans to produce ethanol from an oil refinery in India and the metals sector in South Africa.