A Chicago clean energy startup, spun out of LanzaTech in 2020, announced a new partnership this week.
LanzaJet is collaborating with Technip Energies to help further accelerate the launch and global deployment of its alcohol-to-jet fuel process, which takes ethanol and converts it into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel.
Jimmy Samartzis, CEO of LanzaJet, said the company has been developing the technology for about 13 years and feels the Chicago startup has reached a "tipping point."
"We are now deploying the technology on a commercial scale," he told Chicago Inno. "We have projects involved in places like the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand and several here in the U.S."
Samartzis said that partnering with a top-notch engineering firm like Technip, which is headquartered in Europe with a presence in about 35 countries, will provide support on engineering and construction across the globe to help deploy LanzaJet's solution on a global basis.
He expects LanzaJet's first small-scale commercial plant, about an hour-and-a-half west of Savannah, Georgia, to be operational in early 2024.
"Our facility in Georgia is a total 10 million gallons a year of sustainable fuels capacity, and we are now engineering and deploying the technology up to 300 million gallons a year," he said.
While the aviation industry's goal is to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, with many governments and airlines committed to getting to 10% by 2030, it's a long way from getting there, according to Samartzis.
"For an industry that consumes 100 billion gallons of fossil jet fuel a year, that 10% would mean you're getting to 10 billion gallons of fuel by 2030," he said. "Just this past year, only about 100 million gallons of SAF were produced, giving up only .1% of what the ambition is by 2030."
