LanzaTech has been awarded $3 million by the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the US Department of Energy (DOE), as part of a broader $29 million investment programme to advance carbon management priorities.

LanzaTech’s ADAPT Project – Accelerating Decarbonization via Advanced Production Technologies – was selected to address the  priority of converting carbon dioxide (CO₂) into environmentally responsible and economically valuable products.

The new project builds on the company’s existing capabilities of using CO₂ as a feedstock to produce isopropanol at a pilot scale and aims to advance the ability to process a range of gas mixes with CO₂ and employ advanced gene-editing techniques to develop tailored microbial production strains for making isopropanol and other chemicals

The end-to-end process will also be refined to be more cost-effective, efficient and robust

Isopropanol is a common alcohol used in an array of everyday products such as cleaning agents and is also a precursor to the propylene value chain. Propylene, which is a building block for polypropylene, has a thriving demand market that is projected to approach $150 billion and 180 million tons by 2030. Importantly, isopropanol production has the ability to achieve greenhouse gas savings of over 200% when produced from recycled CO₂ instead of fossil carbon, and a non-fossil commercial production pathway does not exist today.

www.lanzatech.com