The Carbon Revolution: Scaling circularity to replace fossil oil

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Abstract:

The accelerating climate crisis combined with rapid population growth poses some of the most urgent challenges to humankind, all linked to the unabated release and accumulation of CO2 and waste across the biosphere. By harnessing our capacity to partner with biology, we can begin to take advantage of the abundance of available CO2 and waste carbon streams to transform the way the world creates and uses carbon and enable a circular economy.

LanzaTech’s mission is to create a post-pollution future where waste carbon is the building block from which everything is made. Since 2005, LanzaTech has pioneered the development and commercialization of a gas fermentation process for carbon-negative biomanufacturing. LanzaTech’s technology is like retrofitting a brewery onto an emission source like a steel mill or a landfill site, but instead of using sugars and yeast to make beer, pollution is converted by bacteria to fuels and chemicals.

Leveraging carbon-fixing, chemolithoautotrophic microbes, the LanzaTech process transforms a wide array of carbon-containing gas streams (e.g. emissions from heavy industry, gasified agricultural or municipal solid wastes, biogas, or from direct CO2 capture) into a range of fuels, chemicals, proteins and materials. Only 15 years ago, carbon-fixing microbes were poorly understood and considered to be genetically inaccessible. To unlock this biology for industrial use, LanzaTech has developed a state-of-the-art Synthetic Biology and AI platform. Today, LanzaTech has 3 commercial plants in operation, >500 chemical pathways designed and >275,000 tons of CO2 mitigated.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Michael Köpke is the VP Synthetic Biology at LanzaTech, a company that capture and transform carbon it into sustainable products. Michael holds a Ph.D. from University of Ulm and has over 15 years of experience in the biotech field. He is recognized as a pioneer in synthetic biology of CO2 fixing microbes and carbon-negative biomanufacturing, being awarded with the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge award for Greener Synthetic Pathways by the EPA. Michael is an inventor of over 200 patents, authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and contributed to various technical and industry reports. He led the development of EBRC’s technical roadmap on Engineering Biology for Climate & Sustainability by a consortium of over 90 technical experts. In addition to his role at LanzaTech, Michael is an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University, council member at the EBRC and associate editor at Frontiers Microbiology. He chaired several international conferences and workshops and serves in various scientific and industrial advisory roles.

LinkedIn: michael-koepke/

Twitter: michaelkoepke80

Homepage: www.lanzatech.com