- Australia's in-form Head confirmed fit for Boxing Day Test
- Brazilian midfielder Oscar returns to Sao Paulo
- 'Wemby' and 'Ant-Man' to make NBA Christmas debuts
- US agency focused on foreign disinformation shuts down
- On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis launches holy Jubilee year
- 'Like a dream': AFP photographer's return to Syria
- Chiefs seek top seed in holiday test for playoff-bound NFL teams
- Panamanians protest 'public enemy' Trump's canal threat
- Cyclone death toll in Mayotte rises to 39
- Ecuador vice president says Noboa seeking her 'banishment'
- Leicester boss Van Nistelrooy aware of 'bigger picture' as Liverpool await
- Syria authorities say armed groups have agreed to disband
- Maresca expects Man City to be in title hunt as he downplays Chelsea's chancs
- Man Utd boss Amorim vows to stay on course despite Rashford row
- South Africa opt for all-pace attack against Pakistan
- Guardiola adamant Man City slump not all about Haaland
- Global stocks mostly higher in thin pre-Christmas trade
- Bethlehem marks sombre Christmas under shadow of war
- NASA probe makes closest ever pass by the Sun
- 11 killed in blast at Turkey explosives plant
- Indonesia considers parole for ex-terror chiefs: official
- Global stocks mostly rise in thin pre-Christmas trade
- Postecoglou says Spurs 'need to reinforce' in transfer window
- Le Pen says days of new French govt numbered
- Global stocks mostly rise after US tech rally
- Villa boss Emery set for 'very difficult' clash with Newcastle
- Investors swoop in to save German flying taxi startup
- How Finnish youth learn to spot disinformation
- South Korean opposition postpones decision to impeach acting president
- 12 killed in blast at Turkey explosives plant
- Panama leaders past and present reject Trump's threat of Canal takeover
- Hong Kong police issue fresh bounties for activists overseas
- Saving the mysterious African manatee at Cameroon hotspot
- India consider second spinner for Boxing Day Test
- London wall illuminates Covid's enduring pain at Christmas
- Poyet appointed manager at South Korea's Jeonbuk
- South Korea's opposition vows to impeach acting president
- The tsunami detection buoys safeguarding lives in Thailand
- Teen Konstas to open for Australia in Boxing Day India Test
- Asian stocks mostly up after US tech rally
- US panel could not reach consensus on US-Japan steel deal: Nippon
- The real-life violence that inspired South Korea's 'Squid Game'
- Blogs to Bluesky: social media shifts responses after 2004 tsunami
- Tennis power couple de Minaur and Boulter get engaged
- Supermaxi yachts eye record in gruelling Sydney-Hobart race
- Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupts, spewing columns of lava
- Battery X Metals Announces Closing of Non-Brokered Private Placement and Debt Settlement
- MGO Global Announces Closing of Upsized $6.0 Million Public Offering
- The Melrose Group Demands Hank Payments Management Facilitate Requisitioned Shareholder Meetings
- MedMira receives Health Canada approval for its Multiplo(R) Rapid (TP/HIV) Test for Syphilis and HIV
US company turns air pollution into fuel, bottles and dresses
At LanzaTech's lab in the Chicago suburbs, a beige liquid bubbles away in dozens of glass vats.
The concoction includes billions of hungry bacteria, specialized to feed on polluted air -- the first step in a recycling system that converts greenhouse gases into usable products.
Thanks to licensing agreements, LanzaTech's novel microorganisms are already being put to commercial use by three Chinese factories, converting waste emissions into ethanol.
That ethanol is then used as a chemical building block for consumer items such as plastic bottles, athletic wear and even dresses, via tie-ins with major brands such as Zara and L'Oreal.
"I wouldn't have thought that 14 years later, we would have a cocktail dress on the market that's made out of steel emissions," said microbiologist Michael Kopke, who joined LanzaTech a year after its founding.
LanzaTech is the only American company among 15 finalists for the Earthshot Prize, an award for contributions to environmentalism launched by Britain's Prince William and broadcaster David Attenborough. Five winners will be announced Friday.
To date, LanzaTech says it has kept 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while producing 50 million gallons (190 million liters) of ethanol.
That's a small drop in the bucket when it comes to the actual quantities needed to combat climate change, Kopke concedes.
But having spent 15 years developing the methodology and proving its large-scale feasibility, the company is now seeking to ramp up its ambition and multiply the number of participating factories.
"We really want to get to a point where we only use above ground carbon, and keep that in circulation," says Kopke -- in other words, avoid extracting new oil and gas.
- Industry partnerships -
LanzaTech, which employs about 200 people, compares its carbon recycling technology to a brewery -- but instead of taking sugar and yeast to make beer, it uses carbon pollution and bacteria to make ethanol.
The bacteria used in their process was identified decades ago in rabbit droppings.
The company placed it in industrial conditions to optimize it in those settings, "almost like an athlete that we trained," said Kopke.
Bacteria are sent out in the form of a freeze-dried powder to corporate clients in China, which have giant versions of the vats back in Chicago, several meters high.
The corporate clients that built these facilities will then reap the rewards of the sale of ethanol -- as well as the positive PR from offsetting pollution from their main businesses.
The clients in China are a steel plant and two ferroalloy plants. Six other sites are under construction, including one in Belgium for an ArcelorMittal plant, and in India with the Indian Oil Company.
Because the bacteria can ingest CO2, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the process is extremely flexible, explains Zara Summers, LanzaTech's vice president of science.
"We can take garbage, we can take biomass, we can take off gas from an industrial plant," said Summers, who spent ten years working for ExxonMobil.
Products already on the shelves include a line of dresses at Zara. Sold at around $90, they are made of polyester, 20 percent of which comes from captured gas.
"In the future, I think the vision is there is no such thing as waste, because carbon can be reused again," said Summers.
- Sustainable aviation fuel -
LanzaTech has also founded a separate company, LanzaJet, to use the ethanol to create "sustainableaviation fuel" or SAF.
Increasing global SAF production is a huge challenge for the fuel-heavy aviation sector, which is seeking to green itself.
LanzaJet is aiming to achieve one billion gallons of SAF production in the United States per year by 2030.
Unlike bioethanol produced from wheat, beets or corn, fuel created from greenhouse gas emissions doesn't require the use of agricultural land.
For LanzaTech, the next challenge is to commercialize bacteria that will produce chemicals other than ethanol.
In particular, they have their sights set on directly producing ethylene, "one of the most widely used chemicals in the world," per Kopke -- thus saving energy associated with having to first convert ethanol into ethylene.
D.Sawyer--AMWN