Fermenting the way to net zero with LanzaTech and Dr Sean Simpson

The threat of climate change – the saying goes – is like a frog stuck in a rapidly heating pot of water.

“Which would be a true assessment,” says LanzaTech co-founder Dr Sean Simpson, “if the frog was completely unaware of the situation it was in.”

“However, for humans, we are basically frogs that know the pot will be hotter tomorrow and the next day after that. We know that one day the pot is going to be our death.

“And yet we continue to do what we’ve been doing.”

The good news, Dr Simpson says, is that we already have the means to turn down the temperature – and to create new value streams while we’re at it.

Welcome to the world of gas fermentation – where companies like LanzaTech are harnessing ancient biology to recycle and repurpose waste emissions and drive big emitters closer to net zero.

A longstanding collaborator with the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), and one of the founding partners of the University of Queensland’s new $60 million BioSustainability Hub, LanzaTech has been a leader in the gas fermentation space since Dr Simpson helped launch the firm in 2005.

LanzaTech’s carbon recycling technology takes above-ground waste streams from heavy emitters and uses them as a feedstock for specially engineered bacteria that ferments the emissions into ethanol and other handy chemicals.

This means the carbon once spewed out by a steel mill – fed to the right microbiomes - could be the key ingredient in greener jet fuels, bioplastics, or even clothing.

Dr Simpson, who served as LanzaTech chief scientific officer for many years and these days continues as a strategic advisor, says there is still much to learn about the use of carbon feedstocks in gas fermentation, but he is confident the company is on the right track.

He says leaning on the expertise of researchers at UQ’s BioHub will help LanzaTech embed gas fermentation as a standard practice in the industrial landscape and create a true circular economy – as well as address the most pressing issue of our time.

“The climate crisis is not something that it threatens our planet. It threatens our species, and the sad thing is that we know this,” he says.

“It is not a question of whether we want to or not. It’s a question of what we can do right now to address the problem.”

“And so that is what our mission is.”

The AIBN was proud to award Dr Sean Simpson the inaugural AIBN Translational Research Award at the launch of the UQ Biosustainability Hub, in recognition of his impact and innovation in the field of synthetic biology.

Read on to learn just how gas fermentation works, and how it could change the world for the better.

Sean, you often talk about urgency of task at hand with the climate – and a dire need to get to net zero. What’s at stake if we don’t correct course?

Basically, when it comes to the climate crisis, time isn't on our side.

If we keep pumping carbon onto the atmosphere at the rate we are doing so, we will be faced with serious questions.

Where is our food going to come from? Where is our water going to fall?

These are systems that are fundamental. They can't be fixed via innovation in the area of AI or computing.

This gets solved by us reducing the level of CO two in our atmosphere, that is the only thing we can do.

Getting to net zero is not a nice thing to have. It's a must have.

The good thing is that we have the opportunity. We have the ability to invent, to innovate our way out of the crisis that we have created for ourselves.

I suppose that’s where LanzaTech comes in? What does your company do?

When we founded LanzaTech back in 2005 there weren’t many people at all who thought it was possible to do what we wanted to do.

And that was to use waste carbon emissions as a feedstock to produce sustainable fuels and chemicals.

Specifically, LanzaTech has developed carbon recycling technology that converts high volume, low value, above ground waste streams such as flue gasses from industry, municipal soil, waste or trash and agricultural residues.

All of these wastes either exist as gasses or can be turned into gasses with established technology.

We then use our gas fermentation technology to convert waste gasses into sustainable fuels and chemicals.

Fermentation? Like brewing beer?

The concept is actually not too dissimilar.

When we usually think of fermentation - like in the way we make wine or beer – it’s getting yeast microbes to use sugars as a carbon and energy source in order to produce alcohol.

The gas fermentation we perform involves using different microbes – or gas fermenting organisms - that eat waste gasses.

Instead of alcohol, we are producing ethanol: a molecule that can be used directly as a fuel or directly as a chemical.

With synthetic biology, we can choose to channel the carbon energy into new molecules that aren't naturally made by these organisms. We can jump from just being able to make ethanol, to being able to make a spectrum of chemical solutions for a more sustainable economy.

This includes chemicals like acetone – which is used in plexiglass – and we can make isopropanol, which can be used to make propylene.

Is gas fermentation well established as an industry? Or is it something that’s just getting started?

I think what's most interesting about gas fermentation is that this uses a biological process which is thought to have been perhaps the foundation for all life on Earth.

At LanzaTech we are merely harnessing this ancient biology to solve a very modern need. And that need is finding alternatives to oil to make the fuels and chemicals that our societies rely on.

I will say that commercially harnessing this biological process to replace oil is something that has not been around for very long.

But it is something that LanzaTech has been proud to pioneer, and something I think offers tremendous hope for the future in order to produce sustainable fuels and chemicals.

Sustainability has to happen on a massive and global scale, offering really large scale solutions to this very large scale problem that we face. Gas fermentation does exactly that by giving us access to these extremely high volume, low cost resources in the form of waste from industry, agriculture, and society.

LanzaTech is one of the founding commercial partners of the UQ Biosustainability Hub. Why are you backing the BioHub? How does this partnership work?

In my mind the BioHub plays a vital role in shining a light on an area of science that has really not received a great deal of attention historically.

The BioHub is a platform to showcase anaerobic biology and shine a light on gas fermenting organisms, and bring the biology of these organisms into the into public view so it can be made accessible to multiple different stakeholders.

We’ve partnered with the AIBN for more than a decade to develop our technology . And we have gone on to establish a number of commercial-scale gas fermentation facilities. The BioHub is the next phase.

Through the BioHub and through the work that AIBN researchers are doing, we are unravelling, unpicking, and demystifying the biology of these highly specialised organisms and understanding in a much more sophisticated way how we can harness this biology to solve very modern problems such as participation in the energy transition.

So the concept of research as an industry enabler is… promising?

I think any area of science where you have commercial activity, it is usually based on a deep academic and scientific history.

But in gas fermentation, that's actually not the case.

What's unusual in in this field is there are a lot of companies that are seeing the opportunity to use gas fermentation commercially. But to date there has not been a deep bench of academic research that underpins those more applied activities

And so the BioHub to me is a critical element of the commercial activities that these companies are seeking to undertake, because it's providing that academic underpinning, that deep knowledge that we need in order to enable scientific research and scientific commercialisation.

At LanzaTech, we are just starting to scratch the surface as to what is possible with these gas fermenting organisms, to allow them to allow us to access very large volume above ground carbon resources for the production of sustainable materials.

Through the work of the BioHub, we hope to unlock how to accelerate the production of many more different chemicals, many more different products from these resources.

What does success look like for LanzaTech and the BioHub in the years ahead?

I think success here is LanzaTech being able to accelerate the work we are doing, to provide the basis for other companies in the gas fermentation space to be successful using research that comes out of the AIBN and the BioHub.

LanzaTech has certainly shown how you can scale up and produce products from gasses.

And the BioHub is opening up a number of options in terms of the biological processes companies can commercialise.

The BioHub is expanding our understanding of what products we can make, expanding our understanding of what organisms we use, and therefore expanding the commercial space in which we can drive the conversion of above ground carbon resources into sustainable products.