Direct air capture is slowly getting off the ground, with plants up and running in Iceland, Switzerland, the US, and Canada. Much of the carbon these facilities capture is either turned into a solid and stored underground or reused to manufacture various chemicals and industrial products. Now a startup called Twelve is planning to use captured CO2 to make jet fuel.
The company named their carbon conversion platform Opus. The system is modular and can be implemented in existing supply chains, taking CO2 from almost any source. The process uses electrolysis to separate the carbon and oxygen, then recombines the carbon with hydrogen to create fuel. The CO2 will be sourced from nearby ethanol plants, pulp and paper mills, and waste processing facilities.
The US Air Force tested the fuel to ensure it can be safely used without altering existing plane engines. Replacing half of a plane’s regular fuel with CO2-derived fuel can result in 90 percent fewer lifecycle emissions. Alaska Airlines has already agreed to buy fuel from Twelve.
Twelve broke ground on its factory in Washington state earlier this month. The geographic choice was due to several factors. For one, Seattle has long been a hub for aerospace innovation; SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, AeroTEC, and others all have operations there. Washington also has tax incentives for sustainable aviation fuel. And two-thirds of the state’s electricity is generated by hydropower, giving it one of the highest percentages of clean energy in the country.
The facility will initially produce around 40,000 gallons of fuel a year, eventually scaling up to a million gallons a year. That’s a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool when taken in the context of total consumption, which reached an all-time high of 95 billion gallons in 2019.
https://singularityhub.com/2023/07/31/a-new-us-plant-will-use-captured-co2-to-make-millions-of-gallons-of-jet-fuel/
