This week on Circular Business Podcast's weekly gupshup with The Circular Collective we explore a fascinating technology by LanzaTech who are pacing the world towards a Circular Carbon Economy.

They have developed a sophisticated brewery, a gas fermentation process that turns pollution and emission from factories into fuel that powers cars and soon airplanes. To put that into perspective, visualize a beer fermentation process..now instead of converting sugars and yeast to ethanol, the company uses a biological catalyst to ferment waste gas emissions into ethanol. AMAZING right?

Their technology has the potential to displace 30% of crude oil use today and reduce global CO2 emissions by 10%. So how do they do it?

A bacteria found in the gut of a rabbit can now help cars & airplanes run in a more eco-friendly way.

The bacteria, identified by LanzaTech, helps turn factory carbon emissions, a.k.a. Pollution, into ethanol.

For a few decades, Ethanol has been blended with gasoline or petrol to reduce the amount of fuel used by cars.

Today, Ethanol is typically made from corn, sugar cane or grasses, which take a lot of land to grow. So just imagine the amount of efficiency that this technology brings in just by making ethanol by capturing pollution.

They have been working with Virgin Atlantic since 2011, to formulate that jet fuel made from carbon waste gases. The first batch of this sustainable jet fuel was used on a commercial flight for the very first time in 2018– It was the Virgin Atlantic’s VS16 flight from Orlando to London Gatwick, operated by a Boeing 747 aircraft.

Airlines is one such industry which is tough to decarbonize and with this innovation one can visualize the transformation it can bring on the world we know today.

What fascinates me is how they see a future where a steel mill, for example, would make lightweight steel for parts of a plane, and then use production emissions to make fuel for that plane as well as chemicals to produce the synthetic fibers, plastics and rubbers needed for the body and cabin of the aircraft.

Now this is the circular economy in action through waste mitigation, resource efficiency and value addition through carbon reductions.

LanzaTech's raw material comes from the waste gases from Refineries, Cement & Steel plants.

Tune into the episode to learn more about this innovation of brewing pollution into ethanol.

Hope you enjoy listening to this episode and if you are aware of similar groundbreaking technologies in India, then please share it with us on [email protected]

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