Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Company Earns Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) Certification

http://www.einnews.com/pr_news/175535517/beijing-shougang-lanzatech-new-energy-science-technology-company-earns-roundtable-on-sustainable-biomaterials-rsb-certification

LanzaTech's Joint Venture With Shougang Jingtang Iron and Steel United Company and the Tang Ming Group, Earns First-Ever RSB Certification for Waste-Gas to Biofuel Process

WASHINGTON, DC and BEIJING, CHINA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/05/13 -- Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials Services Foundation, the implementing entity of the RSB, announced today that Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. has earned RSB's sustainability certification for the joint venture's facility that converts waste steel mill gases to sustainable biofuels.

The RSB is a global sustainability standard and certification system for biofuels and biomaterials production. The facility, which utilizes LanzaTech technology, is the first RSB-certified biofuel plant in China, and the first of its kind anywhere to receive this key certification for industrial carbon capture and utilization.

"The joint venture uses a process that creates a sustainable biofuel and does so by efficiently reusing greenhouse gases that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere," said Peter Ryus, RSB Services' CEO. "This solution, which does not impact the food chain or land use, meets the RSB principles and practices and serves as an example of how continued innovation in the industry will lead to sustainable biofuels in the future. We are honored to be working with LanzaTech and their joint venture partners on greenhouse gas reduction and global sustainability improvements."

RSB certification shows the joint venture's commitment to environmental improvements through a novel biological approach that converts waste carbon emissions from steelmaking into biofuels and chemicals. Using the RSB methodology and assumptions based on commercial production, it is estimated that ethanol from the process may reduce life cycle greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent compared to petroleum fuels.

In addition, the joint venture partners anticipate that the process will improve local air quality by materially reducing nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate emissions. The technology has the potential of making a significant global impact by reusing up to 150 million tonnes of CO2 from the global steel industry alone.

The use of novel gas fermentation technology to convert industrial waste gases into biofuels is aligned perfectly with the RSB Principles and Criteria, which go beyond greenhouse gas emissions reductions to focus on economic and social sustainability. By using a widely available waste resource located in areas typically unsuitable for agriculture, LanzaTech's process reduces overall emissions without negatively impacting the food chain or causing land use changes. By enabling the production of fuels from available steelmaking waste, Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. will help China balance economic growth with sustainability, as well as increase its supply of domestic biofuels.

RSB certification provides assurance that biofuels and biomaterials deliver on their promise of sustainability. Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. chose to work with RSB because of its rigorous sustainability standard, auditing approach, and its broad acceptance. The RSB standard provides a comprehensive approach that incorporates the standard with other operational, management and physical standards such as ISO risk management and environmental management to ensure every base is covered.

"The RSB certification is an incredibly important step for the development of our commercial production facilities which we expect to bring online in 2014," said Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech. "In addition, we trust this certification will help accelerate the acceptance of biofuels made through carbon capture technologies and serve to showcase the possibilities opened up by thinking of carbon emissions as an opportunity, not just a problem."

RSB is a preferred standard of major airlines globally, including LanzaTech's partner Virgin Atlantic and the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group, an aviation industry-led coalition that is supporting the development, certification, and commercial use of lower carbon renewable fuels, derived from sustainable sources.

Virgin Atlantic President Sir Richard Branson previously described the LanzaTech process as "one of the most exciting developments of our lifetime and a major breakthrough in the war on carbon." Reflecting on this latest development, he says "RSB's certification of the Beijing facility is a crucial step to ensure this revolutionary new fuel will meet the highest possible environmental standards and will result in a radical reduction in our carbon footprint."

Virgin Atlantic Chief Executive Craig Kreeger notes: "Our partnership with LanzaTech is a key part of our Change is in the Air sustainability program. Beyond our significant fleet upgrades and our comprehensive fuel efficiency programme, this breakthrough opportunity to pioneer away from fossil fuels offers us the best possible chance of substantially reducing the carbon emissions associated with our flying programme. Key to that has always been ensuring that any new fuel meets the highest possible sustainability standards, and we view RSB as the gold standard scheme to help us to achieve this. We're excited and committed to help hasten the day when we are using LanzaTech's RSB-certified fuel to power our aircraft."

The audit summary report is available on the RSB website, www.rsbservices.org. The audit was conducted by SCS Global Services (SCS), www.scsglobalservices.com, a leading global provider of third-party environmental and sustainability certification, auditing, testing, and standards development for nearly 30 years.

About LanzaTech

LanzaTech is a leader in gas fermentation technology. It provides novel and economic routes to fuels and high value chemicals from waste gas streams. LanzaTech's unique process provides a sustainable pathway to produce platform chemicals that serve as building blocks to products that have become indispensable in our lives such as rubber, plastics, synthetic fibers and fuels.

LanzaTech's technology solutions mitigate carbon emissions from industry without adversely impacting food or land security. With commercial facilities in China slotted for construction in 2014, LanzaTech, a company founded in New Zealand, is now a global organization. More information is available at www.lanzatech.com.

About Shougang Group

Shougang Group is a large enterprise group founded in 1919. While Shougang's main business is iron and steel, the Group is also engaged in mining, machinery, electronics, construction, real estate, services and international trading. Shougang has made great progress, especially since economic reforms began in China 30 years ago.

Entering the new century, the steel industry is facing unprecedented pressure and challenges, as well as unprecedented development opportunities. Shougang has created a first class iron and steel enterprise by actively promoting optimization of the industry's structure, promoting continuous innovation and pioneering new product development and production processes. Shougang has also changed its traditional product line to produce high-grade sheet metal, an historical change. In the past thirty years, Shougang steel's production capacity has increased from 1.79 million tons to 12.19 million tons and sales income has increased from 1.443 billion yuan to 132 billion yuan. The Group has paid more than 57.66 billion yuan in tax revenue and has made a significant contribution to the development of the modern Chinese iron and steel industry. More information is available at http://www.shougang.com.cn/shougang_cn_web/
 
About Tang Ming Group 

Tang Ming Group Ltd was established in November 1999. It was successfully formed into a corporation with China Shougang Group in 2003 to establish Shougang Tangming (Auckland) Corporation Ltd. In 2011, Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd was established in Beijing.

About RSB Services
The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) certification system helps farmers, feedstock processors and biomaterial producers prove their sustainability to the world. Certified entities demonstrate that their operations comply with ambitious yet practical safeguards, including the protection of natural or rare ecosystems, food security, and respect for human rights to land, water and decent work conditions, and the management of water resources. With unmatched NGO support, global market compatibility across all feedstocks, practical guidance and tools for an ongoing sustainability system, RSB Services Foundation, the implementing entity of the RSB, helps companies manage their risk and increase shareholder and consumer confidence through the certification of their businesses. More information about RSB certification can be found at www.rsbservices.org. 

Media Contacts:
John Williams
Scoville PR for LanzaTech
jwilliams@scovillepr.com
+1-206-625-0075

Helena Kennedy
Director of Communications at RSB Services Foundation
hkennedy@rsbservices.org
+1-703-725-4626

Irvine Renewable Fuels Firm Halts Work on Mississippi Plant

http://www.ocbj.com/news/2013/mar/01/irvine-renewable-fuels-firm-halts-work-mississippi/

Jane Yu Friday, March 1, 2013 

Irvine-based renewable fuels maker BlueFire Renewables Inc. has halted construction work on a plant planned for Fulton, Miss. plant.

BlueFire converts non-food resources, such as trash, wood waste and other agricultural residues, into ethanol. It also has a subsidiary called SucreSource LLC in Anaheim, which makes cellulosic sugars for the commercial applications.

It began working on the Fulton plant in 2009. The facility was designed to employ about 80 workers and produce 19 million gallons of ethanol per year. The project, which was estimated to cost $300 million, had seen some progress on permits and site preparation.

Work recently was put on hold while BlueFire focuses on building a facility in South Korea, according to Greg Deakle, the executive director of Itawamba County Development Council in Mississippi.

BlueFire signed a deal last year with GS Caltex, a South Korea-based petroleum company, to build a cellulose sugar plant there.

The company counts another Asian partner in Beijing-based Chinese Huadian Engineering Co.

Greener planet is goal for 3 startups

http://www.equities.com/news/headline-story?dt=2012-12-16&val=832224&cat=material

By Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

Dec. 16--If the glut of companies billing themselves as "solutions" providers is any indication, the world has no shortage of problems.

Green tech companies take on some of the most complicated, difficult problems to solve. They tend to be problems created by our mere existence, chief among them our massive demand for energy. The more we rely on energy to power our electronics, our vehicles and our lives, the more pollution we churn into our land, water and air.

The Tribune checked in with three local green tech startups at various stages of development. They haven't changed the world yet, but they're working on it.

COMPANY: LanzaTech

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: Global warming, a huge challenge as energy demand is expected to double within 40 years.

FUNDS RAISED: $100 million

It may sound like sci-fi, but LanzaTech produces gas-eating "bugs" that don't require oxygen to survive.

In April, the company's microscopic bacteria began ingesting carbon monoxide from a steel mill in China. Carbon monoxide goes in one end of the bacteria and ethanol comes out the other.

With a few genetic tweaks, the bug can produce a wide range of fuels and chemicals from gases that companies spend money to get rid of. The idea, says Jennifer Holmgren, the company's chief executive, is to trap nasty gases that float from steel mills, power plants and chemical factories, turning them into products that are useful and profitable.

The company recently inked a deal with Petronas, the national oil company of Malaysia, to develop a modified version of the bug that takes in carbon dioxide and produces acetic acid, a chemical companies need to produce polymers used in plastics.

"Rather than trying to sequester carbon deep into the earth, we will 'bury' it in a chemical," Holmgren said. "In this way, companies can not only comply with emissions reduction requirements, but also generate revenue along the way."

When Holmgren talks about the technology's potential, she pulls up a map of the world, showing partnerships and agreements the company has with companies from Boeing Co. in Chicago and Kansas-based Invista, the world's largest nylon producer, to Indian Oil Co. in New Delhi and Mitsui & Co. Ltd. in Japan.

Out of the company's various projects, the carbon monoxide-eating bacteria are the furthest along in the path toward commercialization. This month, LanzaTech finished a demonstration project for China's largest steel manufacturer, Baosteel, at a plant near Shanghai.

LanzaTech successfully produced the equivalent of more than 100,000 gallons of ethanol per year from just a fraction of the carbon monoxide the company creates in the steel-making process.

"You're literally driving for miles watching this steel mill," Holmgren said, explaining its vast size -- and its potential to produce hundreds of millions of gallons of ethanol per year.

The technology creates a financial incentive to trap the gas rather than flare it, a common practice that produces carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Through a series of pipes, the gas enters a vessel filled with the organism, which is floating in water. Fuel comes out the back end and is pumped through a distiller to create pure ethanol.

Because of the success of that demonstration, the steel company has ordered the first of what will eventually be three or four units, each about $80 million, that are each expected to produce 30 million to 50 million gallons of ethanol per year. Each unit pays itself back in under five years, Holmgren said.

"We don't want it to be green for green's sake. If it is, no one is going to use it," she said.

With 140 employees worldwide, LanzaTech doesn't have any revenues to report yet. Holmgren said LanzaTech expects to grow to profitability between 2013 and 2015.

LanzaTech to Convert Baosteel Mill Fumes Into Ethanol, CEO Says

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-03/lanzatech-to-convert-baosteel-mill-fumes-into-ethanol-ceo-says.html

By Andrew Herndon - Dec 3, 2012 8:00 AM ET

LanzaTech NZ Ltd., a closely held developer of transportation fuels and chemicals from waste industrial gases, plans to begin building next year an ethanol plant at a Baosteel Group Corp. steel mill in China.

The facility will use LanzaTech’s genetically-modified microorganisms to convert carbon monoxide-containing gas into as much as 10 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol a year starting in 2014, Chief Executive Jennifer Holmgren said by telephone Nov. 30. Financing is being arranged by Baosteel, she said, and wouldn’t disclose the expected cost.

The project is a joint venture with Baosteel, China’s second largest steel manufacturer, and scales up a 100,000 gallon a year demonstration plant the companies installed at one of Baosteel’s mills near Shanghai. Results from that project “have shown that the scaling of the technology has been successful,” LanzaTech, based in Auckland, New Zealand, said in an e-mailed statement.

LanzaTech also has a venture with Shougang Group, China’s fourth-largest steelmaker, and industrial companies in India, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are evaluating projects with the company. Holmgren told Bloomberg in January she may begin considering an IPO after successful operations of the Baosteel demonstration.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Herndon in San Francisco at aherndon2@bloomberg.net
 
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net

Answers for your biofuels questions: Coskata, LanzaTech, butanol

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2012/08/05/answers-for-your-biofuels-questions-coskata-lanzatech-butanol/

Jim Lane | August 5, 2012 

 

Here in Digestville, we debut this week a content collaboration with Consumer Energy Report, a must-see content site that we recommend you check out and bookmark. Twice a month, we’ll check in with CER and excerpt their latest and greatest – including contributions from CER and Energy Trends editor and noted biofuels commentator Robert Rapier.
In our first collaborative, RR answers some questions from readers. One is on Lanzatech, and the other is about the feasibility  of filtering for butanol separations. The questions were slightly edited for brevity.

Q. I am interested if the decision by Coskata shall flow on to Lanzatech and their purchase of Range Fuels in regards to ethanol?

We are currently developing a project that incorporates a number of pieces, however we are considering the use of natural gas as a dual feedstock to produce critical volume likely producing methanol as a fuel and chemical base. Our view is to follow the lead by China and to develop technologies and processes around methanol to fuel. Currently we are are undertaking research and developing a possible business model.

Do you think we are going to see a vhs (ethanol) vs beta (methanol) situation develop in the future?

RR answers: Lanzatech has technology that was close to Coskata’s technology, so this is certainly a good question. In my opinion, Lanzatech is going to have a tough time making cost-competitive ethanol for many of the same reasons that caused Coskata to shift to natural gas. If you don’t want to make a full commitment to natural gas, I think a low-risk approach (but probably higher capital) is the one you describe in which you would have a capability of feeding natural gas into the process.

Natural gas should work fine in Lanzatech’s process, and would certainly be a lower capital option than wood waste. I know they would ideally like to process waste streams that contain a lot of carbon monoxide, but they are going to need the capability of building greenfield plants that provide their own feedstock. Natural gas could be a path forward.

As far as ethanol versus methanol, in my view methanol and di-methyl-ether (DME) produced from methanol are likely to gain a stronger foothold in China before they do so in the U.S. The U.S. agricultural lobby has not looked favorably upon methanol in the U.S., and I believe they will fight hard to keep it out of the fuel supply and protect ethanol’s market share. After all, there is already a large supply of cheap methanol in the U.S. and approximately none of it ends up in the fuel supply. I don’t expect that situation to change soon, but if you are thinking about China as a target market then your chances may be better there.

Q: This may be a dumb question (chemistry is not my area), but has anyone looked at simply filtering the butanol from the water?  What are the relative molecular sizes?

RR answers: This particular issue is in reference to the energy-intensity of separating a solution containing low levels of butanol. For reference, I have written in some detail about this issue in Butanol 101 .

It’s not a dumb question; in fact membranes can be used to separate butanol from water. The membranes I am familiar with don’t work on the basis of size differences (although some gas membranes do) but rather the relative polarity of butanol and water. Since butanol is a less polar molecule than water, some membranes such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) that present a hydrophobic surface allow butanol to migrate into the membrane while excluding water.

This sort of separation can allow low-concentration butanol that is generally produced from biological processes (perhaps 2% to 6% butanol) to concentrate up to above the phasing concentration (~8% for n-butanol). Once the phasing concentration is reached, the energy requirements are far lower because the mixture separates into a butanol-rich phase containing maybe 20% water and a water-rich phase containing about 8% butanol. Therefore, instead of distilling off a mixture of 95% water and 5% butanol — which is extremely energy-intensive — you would distill a mixture that contains only 20% water.

The disadvantage is that the total costs of operating a membrane system are still not cheap. Chemical companies that produce billions of gallons of butanol each year are well aware of such systems, and have taken a look at the economics many times. But a fundamental difference between the petrochemical process and the biological process is that the former does not have to remove copious amounts of water as is the case in the latter. Therefore, the economics may be more compelling to utilize membranes for those pursuing the biological route.