DavidPBL

I should have been more specific. I was trying to ask about generating renewable energy and then using that at some other site for heating purposes. What kind of efficiency does electricity to heat get you compared to just burning fossil fuels on site? I am not sure if that is the best way of asking this question.

Gotcha, I reread what you wrote andit makes more sense to me now.

What are your thoughts on using renewable electricity for heating applications as a way to displace burning of fossil fuels?

I am not an expert in traditional fermentation but I believe presence of contaminants depends on the crop, the strain of yeast present during the process, and conditions. So basically it can vary a lot.

I haven't read the link yet, but did not expect synthetic alcohol to be used for food and beverages.

We ferment CO2 + H2 rather than syngas (CO / CO + H2 / CO + H2 + CO2) but yes gas fermentation is not new technology.

Like traditional chemical processes which use metal catalysts, superior catalyst design improves the performance and ultimately the economics of the process.

Edit: I should have mentioned that it's not just the catalyst that has been improved, the design of the process itself has been improved. So upstream (gasification) and the design of the bioreactor also impact how well the process works.

Thank you.

We are building the frameworks so that we will be able to take advantage of this but haven't yet. Can message me via the webform on our website? I would love to learn more about HPC, my understanding is limited.

From my understanding, OER occurs when splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen and can happen in biological and electrochemical systems. In the former plants use energy from sunlight to extract the electrons from water whereas in the latter, energy from electricity is used. In our process we use hydrogen that is oroduced elsewhere, it isn't part of our technology so we don't run into this issue.

Multiple solutions are needed to address climate change and CCU is just one of many levers we can use to decarbonise our industries. Sure CCU isn't as direct as DAC, but coupling CCU with biogenic sources of CO2 can create a carbon negative process if the product doesn't degrade. Solvents may not fit the bill for storing carbon for centuries, but plastics do.

The more immediate impact for CCU is the emissions reduction achieved via displacement of fossil derived solvents.

Didn't know that! I assumed it was always captured elsewhere.

As we find new profitable uses for CO2 the demand for it will increase, which should help create new carbon value chains.

They don't live in ethanol and water but it has been tested and they can survive quite high concentrations of ethanol.

And yes they could convert CO2 into recreational drinking fluid, and I learned from someone else in this thread that it would be totally legal!

I definitely underappreciated how important communication is.

I would describe hydrogen as an energy carrier rather than an energy source. Hydrogen is always made from something else, and the energy is either provided by that something else, or indirectly from another source, or a combination of both.

If you use an electrolyser to make hydrogen from water, your energy source is actually the electricity used to drive that reaction. The energy is stored as hydrogen gas.

Large bodies of water are great passive systems to capture CO2. For the outdoors, and if using sunlight is the energy source, algae and seaweed are definitely great candidates for capturing CO2.

Unfortunately your idea wouldn't work for our microorganisms as it is anaerobic, so it would die if exposed to air. But I like your idea for using sunlight to improve the growing conditions of algae + using automation for harvesting!

You're absolutely right regarding enthalpy and thanks for fixing the typos. I am still trying to find the best way to communicate what we are doing.

I find it ironic that carbon capture and storage technology was originally (might be wrong here) developed for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

But yes we really need better systems to incentivize the capture and storage or utilisation of CO2. Carbon taxes a great place to start.

The short answer is with great difficulty!

If you do some back of napkin math on petrochemicals, which accounts for roughly 20% of oil usage there is a huge opportunity to displace petroleum using recycled carbon.

Global oil consumption is roughly 100 million barrels / day (today). 1 barrel is 160 kg, so annual petrochemical volumes are roughly 1.1 billion tons of product (20 million * 160 kg / 1000 (to get tons) * 365 days). That is at todays consumption. Chemical usage is expected to grow over the next several decades. Of course this is ignoring recycling carbon into e-fuels. There will be a need for those too.

In terms of actually scaling the technology, heavy industry is widespread and is a source of large scale point source emissions, ranging from as little as 10,000 tons of CO2 emissions / year all the way up to 10 million tons of CO2 / year. It is all about retrofitting these industrial sites with this type of technology to supply local markets the chemicals they need. This ignores the other sources of carbon that will become available via carbon capture (stationary or mobile) as well as direct air capture. It's tough to imagine exponential growth, but things can be very different by 2040.

My bad! We are engineering our microorganisms which means we are assembling DNA parts into plasmids which are used to deliver the DNA into the host. So there is the design and then the actual build part before the actual testing.

Depending on what you want to do you build a different style of plasmid. If its genetic modification (ex. using CRISPR) you use one type, if it's testing a new pathway, you build another. You use software to help with the design of everything and to define and explore the solution space.

To make it high throughput we usually test things using in vitro (cell-free systems) before actually moving into the host. In vitro work has a faster DBTL cycle than in vivo work. We test strains in smaller experiments (20-100 ml) before moving to bioreactors (1-2L).

We would like to automate more and build a more robust R&D pipeline to support faster DBTL cycles, but you can be limited by the epuipment available. Doing highthroughput automated work is great for productivity, but it costs more. So has been challenging to implement everywhere we would like due to resources.

Very interesting! I did not know that, thank you for sharing.

This explains how Air Company is selling their ethanol as vodka.

Short answer is no. The real value in our solution is going from C1 compounds like CO2 to C2 or C3 or longer chain compounds. This is the real difficulty. Methanol is still a C1 compound. Biology could do it, but it's not what it excels at.

Maersk has commissioned 8 ships to run on methanol. For context, Maersk owns 550 ships. Gives you an idea of the size of the transportation fuel problem.

Absolutely it is hard! No denying that.

This is one of the challenges we face against companies that are spinning out research that has been publicly funded for many years or on a more personal note, going up against people who came from more prestigious institutions. But we think we have identified a niche that is worth pursuing.

I think Zymergen is an interesting case study and serves as an example to companies developing 'new products'. Like most things there is no perfect solution. New products open new markets, new opportunities, and may seem less risky at the beginning, but what happened to Zymergen is an example of what can happen when rolling out new products (in this space of course). Drop in replacements for example don't face those same risks, but they have other challenges of course.

Current regulations (in Europe, and I believe the US is the same) is that only ethanol produced using yeast-based fermentation of crops can be sold for human consumption.

The day to day in lab really depends on the type of lab you are working in.

If you are working in analytics, running assays (tests) on things like blood or urine samples (hospitals or clinical trials) or a more recent example would be a covid clinic, the day can be very monotonous. There is a lot of paperwork involved due to the regulations you need to adhere to (GMP, GCP, GLP). This is one of the reasons I didn't like working in pharma. It's better now to things becoming digital, but the point is the work can be very repetitive.

If you are working in an R&D lab things are more dynamic. You might be running similar experiments from one day to the next, but the context is always different. Even though you hit a roadblock and get stuck for a day, a week or a month, as things progress the type of work will change as the project evolves/progresses.

You can work in industry in either of the above environments, both provide valuable experience. Industry is stricter and more rigid than academic labs.

Day to day it's still very hands on. Things are progressing such that you spend less and less time in the lab as things become automated and the workflow becomes digitised, but you still need to go into the lab even if it is to setup the robot. We don't yet have robots to control the robots, although maybe sooner than we think. At high level, most R&D lab employ some sort of design, build, test, learn (DBTL) workflow, even if they don't call it that. Depending on what the focus is, each step in that cycle will be slightly different.

The amount of software is growing every day for all applications. You have everything from basic software like Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) to help with basic ops to more complex software to help plan workflows and analyse data (Synthace) to much more specific software like protein modelling (Rosetta) or genetic manipulation (Geneious) and the list goes on. I am barely scratching the surface here. I regret not having more training in python.

edit: not a perfect article, but to give you more of a flavor for software in synbio/biotech, check this out: https://www.builtwithbiology.com/read/the-synbio-stack-part-...

100% agree. I think carbon taxes are really important here.

Lanzatech are an amazing company. They are pioneers/trailblazers in the field and I have a lot of respect for them. They have demonstrated that they gas fermentation works at scale. There are advantages and disadvantages to their approach, like all technologies / solutions.

Thank you!

I may have misused the term 'work' here. I was trying to describe the displacement of an object through the actions of something like a motor. You can achieve that by burning fuels (combustion engine), or steam, or an electric motor. I was trying to allude to the latter being the most efficient.

I am optimistic that with the interest, government policy and both public and private funding, we can achieve the necessary scale required. It will probably take longer than the optimists predict and less time than the pessimists think.

edit: some interesting hydrogen companies

https://www.sunhydrogen.com/technology (like a solar panel but for hydrogen, uses light energy to split water into H2 + O2)

https://www.alchemr.com/technology/ (electrolysers that use non precious metals)

https://www.h2pro.co/technology (membrane free electrolysers)

There are also several companies developing 'turquoise' hydrogen, which is a plasma based technology. I have no connection to this website, but the first few paragraphs it lists a few companies in this space: https://www.h2-view.com/story/four-more-technologies-for-tur...

I am cheering for the hydrogen companies, we need them!

Core of the innovation is around the engineering of the microorganism. One way to think of it is that it is similar to chip designs. In the 80s (I think) ARM designed chips that had super low power consumption. They patented that design and those chip designs are why we enjoy better battery life on our devices today. We have a similar approach in terms of where our IP resides.

In terms of chemical reactions, we can in theory produce almost any chemical compound found in nature directly, and all chemicals in multiple steps. Our process is anaerobic so we can't do reactions (yet) that require an oxidation step. For context, there are more than 200,000 organic compounds found in the biosphere.

Thank you!

There are a couple of things at play here.

So first, if you need to do 'work', then definitely just use electricity directly to do the job, which is much more efficient.

I agree it wouldnt make sense to split natural gas (into CO2 + H2) and then recombine it back into ethanol, although oil companies would love to do this as they have billions in stranded assets in the form of natural gas.

Ideally you couple some process that generates CO2 (not from burning fossil fuels) with renewable electricity to recycle that carbon back into useful chemicals to displace petroleum derived chemicals. Two examples of this would be cement manufacture and industrial brewing. But yes you need an external energy input, like with most things.

As a side note, the impact of this depends on where you get your energy (renewable of course) and your carbon. Some companies have caught onto this. For example Unilever created a carbon 'rainbow' to separate the types of carbon. Recycling renewable carbon is the goal here.