In March, a team of researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LanzaTech was awarded the 2023 American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Award for Affordable Clean Chemistry at the ACS Spring meeting for development of a clean and sustainable alcohol-to-jet-fuel catalytic process, which holds promise for helping the nation achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
The ACS Award recognizes outstanding scientific discoveries that lay the foundation for environmentally friendly products or manufacturing processes.
This discovery was made possible due to industry partner LanzaTech’s carbon recycling process that first converts industrial waste gases to ethanol, then undergoes an innovative catalytic process developed at PNNL to upgrade the ethanol to fuel approved for commercial aviation.
“It’s amazing that you can take these carbon emissions from a steel mill plant and turn it into a fuel—instead of emitting the gases into the atmosphere. It almost seems like magic, but it’s not. It’s good scientific principles and thinking about the thermodynamics of the process to really do something fundamentally different that hadn’t been done before,” said John Holladay a former PNNL senior leader who joined LanzaTech in 2021.