The ABCDE chain: Acetogens, the Baltic forests, Clean fuels, Dorpat, the Enlightenment

Recently, we reported that researchers at the University of Tartu are undertaking a project to engineer gas-fermenting acetogens to more efficiently  fuels and chemicals, and create nearly 750 modified bacterial strains and consolidate the collected data as well as existing similar information about acetogens in a public knowledgebase.

If you have gleaned from earlier editions of The Digest that acetogens can make the useful chemical acetate from waste carbon and green hydrogen, you’ve remembered it well. If recall is sketchy, may I recommend All Your Acetogen Are Belong to Us: The Digest’s 2018 Multi-Slide Guide to acetone and drop-in biofuels from syngas fermentation.

If you can say “LanzaTech” and ring a bell somewhere in your mind, then you already know something about acetogens. What does an acetogen eat? Unlike other X-gens that eat hydrogen and carbon dioxide, Lanza critters naturally gravitate towards a diet of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren and team are the leading practitioners of “second chance carbon” and have been on the lecture circuit for years to share a vision that carbon is not our problem, it is the unlocking of fossil carbon from its pristine reservoirs that has us in trouble with all the greenhouse gas emissions.

The Universal Laws of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Which of course puts LanzaTech and those who agree with them on the wrong side of what you might call the Houston Universal Laws of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. They are four. 

Law #1. Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are harmless or might as well be harmless because we’re not going to do anything about them, and in fact will actively seek to prevent anyone else doing anything about them, until someone figures out a way that remediation becomes an industry valuable to Houston. Until then, venting is fine.

Law #2. Unfortunately, carbon monoxide and methane are poisonous to residents of Houston and can’t be vented in large volumes. So they can and should be flared into carbon dioxide. Thence, refer to Rule #1.

Law #3. All other greenhouse gas sources don’t count because no one in Houston can pronounce them.

Law #4. We have in Houston some otherwise intelligent and valuable citizens who don’t agree with the universal rules of greenhouse gas emissions. They are permitted to dwell amongst us so long as they don’t bring up the subject at parties, subject to a fine of one cow.

Bicker, bicker, bicker, that’s what we do — fiddling while oil burns, if you will allow me to vary the description of the Emperor Nero.

The Ancient Art of Airing Grievances about Foul Air

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the debate about the fouling of the air, and the role of chemistry and electricity in repairing same, is new.  It is regrettable that the remarkable 1793 book Zweckmäßige Luftreiniger by Georg Frederic Parrot is out of print and unavailable in English, and I’d be surprised if you had heard of it. For a list of reasons outside the scope of this column, it is a favorite of mine.

“There was no lack of scholars who analyzed the air chemically, and from that time onwards millions of voices echoing that man was poisoning his own air. People shouted, people wrote, people quarreled,” Parrot wrote from Offenbach, where he had relocated from his native Franche-Comte as the French Revolution interrupted the economy in his home town of Montbeliard, the modern home to Peugeot.

Parrot is not well known today. If this first Rector of the Imperial University of Dorpat (now, Tartu) was famous in years gone by, it was because he was the Enlightenment’s pen pal of Tsar Alexander I of Russia (the Tsar who defeated Napoleon). Alexander and Parrot were to each other, in many ways, as Voltaire and Frederick the Great a generation before.

Parrot wrote about farmers something that I think about often:

“You understand that those who feed you are entitled to much more than merely a miserable existence, that they have every right to expect your gratitude, your respect, our gratitude, our respect.”

Yet, Parrot was more than an Enlightenment figure, he an able theorist and experimental scientist. Just as Volta and Galvani quarreled bitterly over the nature of bioelectrics, Parrot and Volta quarreled over the nature of galvanism, the production of an electric current via chemicals, which inspired the modern battery and I might add the novel Frankenstein. The university he built at Tartu remains the intellectual center of Estonia, and in almost every advance in the remarkable Estonian bioeconomy story, the University has played some role — particularly well known for fostering innovation, which befits that its name forms the bulk of the word sTARTUp.

The forests of Estonia

The essence of Estonia, however, are the forests. They cover half the country and the nation is besotted with them — google “deep connection” and “Estonian forests” some time, and you’ll see. One day, perhaps, the Estonians will have a forest economy as vigorous as their cousins to the north in Finland, where the nation maintains its own deep connection to nature and utilizes about 9 percent of its forest assets each year. That’s nine times the utility rate contemplated by the US Billion-Ton Study of biomass resources, and yet you never hear of Finns lying down in front of tractors to prevent the death of the forests.

Nine percent of 165 million tons of biomass (Estonia’s forests)  — that’s about 16.6 million tons per year at the Finnish rate and, converted into $1300 per ton of low-carbon fuels or materials at a 27 percent yield, that’s around $5.9 billion in value-add for the Estonian economy, which is around $38 billion today. 

Acetogenesis? That could unlock some further opportunity, especially if hydrogen is in the mix. That’s one reason to keep an eye on PCEI Hy2Move, a project we reported on a few days back, covering a wide part of the hydrogen technology value chain, by supporting the development of a set of technological innovations, with Estonia one of seven EU nations in the mix.

A Gas Fermentation Renaissance

We think that a renaissance in gas fermentation is in the offing, and not just because of all the success that LanzaTech has had getting projects formed, finished and deployed.. We see the old INEOS Bio technology making a comeback as Jupeng Bio, the old Coskata technology is back as Synata Bio. The race for carbon-advantaged biofuels and the challenges of the solids-to-liquids conversion problem has many enterprising companies and experts taking a fresh look at gas fermentation. 

This news from Estonia is part of a larger trend, and — combined with parallel development of green hydrogen — could be a foundational technology that unleashes the potential for electrofuels — made from CO2 and green hydrogen — at a scale that will shift the global needle on carbon at a price that can be afforded. E-Fuels have been coming along but more companies, more scale, and some breakthroughs on cost are required. Keep a lookout for the role that acetogens may play in that activity, keep an eye on Estonia and the University of Tartu. 

You might spare a though also for good old Georg Frederic Parrot and his observation, in the year of France’s reign of terror, that we were arguing even back then about what to do about all the emissions. He’d be delighted to think that a generation had come along prepared to do something for once and forever about the problem.