Time Magazine names Skokie CEO Holmgren to top 100 worldwide fighting climate change

Recycling, usually paper, metal and plastic, has long been promoted by those looking to fight climate change. But recycling carbon itself? It’s a concept that Skokie-based LanzaTech has successfully implemented, which led Time magazine to name company CEO Jennifer Holmgren one of its inaugural, worldwide Time Climate 100 list, or the 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders in Business, for 2023.

According to Time, the list was created to honor individuals “making significant progress in fighting climate change by creating business value.”

LanzaTech developed the world’s first jet fuel derived from carbon emissions that otherwise would have been dumped into the atmosphere. That’s just one of the uses the company is finding for waste gases that contribute to climate change.

“We are a gas fermentation company,” said Dr. Zara Summers, chief science officer at LanzaTech. “You might know about sugar fermentation if you drink beer or wine. We use a bacterial catalyst that takes gases like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and convert those to ethanol at a commercial scale.”

In practice, that means emissions from large-scale industries can be significantly reduced — and the captured carbon can be reused for other purposes, eliminating the need for additional fossil fuels to be taken from the ground. The company plans to use this technology in 20 plants by the end of 2024 (six are operating now) — with each installation reducing carbon emissions by the equivalent of 120,000 cars on the road, company sources said.

“We need carbon to live, but we can live with carbon differently,” Holmgren said in a statement from the company. “I hope more industrial emitters, brands, governments, and consumers join us in accelerating the shift toward a circular carbon economy.”

The idea of “carbon capture” is familiar to those who follow the climate change issue. In October, a planned pipeline in Illinois was canceled after opposition arose from landowners and environmentalists against the idea of storing unwanted carbon emissions underground. LanzaTech has, by contrast, focused on “carbon capture and utilization” technology, which transforms that carbon into new products.

“Imagine you’re a steel mill, and you have those massive furnaces to melt down the iron ore and convert it into steel,” Summers said. “In order to heat that, you’re burning a lot of material. So we take the off-gas from those furnaces, and we pipe that into our reactor.”

In the massive, tube-shaped reactor, bacteria are used to transform the mixture.

“The carbon is in the gas stream,” she said. “You bubble that through the reactor. Our microbes take the gas that’s dissolved into the liquid — they take that carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide molecule — and turn it into ethanol. So now we’ve used that carbon instead of it going into the atmosphere.

“Pumping into the atmosphere is the loss of a valuable commodity,” Summers said. “We can make something out of it.”

What can be created with that ethanol is almost limitless — from jet fuel to consumer clothing.

“People are starting to get engaged in the process of where the things you buy are coming from,” Summers said. “Now, no one gets on a plane and says, I wonder where the jet fuel came from? But they are thinking about the clothes they wear. We’re at the point where steel mill emissions can help create a beautiful cocktail dress.”

LanzaTech already has partnerships with several apparel companies, including On Running and Craghoppers, to create lines of clothing made with biorecycled material. The costs to consumers are on par with similar pieces created with traditional fossil fuels, but with much less environmental impact.

LanzaTech has been headquartered in Skokie’s Illinois Science and Technology Park since 2012, when the company moved here from New Zealand in order to install Holmgren, honored in the Dec. 4 issue of Time, as CEO.

“(Holmgren) was based in Chicago, so the company decided to make the move,” Summers said. More than 200 people now work out of the Skokie office. “It’s been very successful for us. We have a good pipeline of talent from local universities, and being in the Midwest has a lot of advantages for us.”

While LanzaTech may be one of the leaders in the biorecycling field, Summers said that she expects the field to grow significantly as its benefits become more apparent.

“There’s no real downside to taking advantage of this technology,” she said. “Why not reduce your emissions while creating another revenue stream? Why not get things into the market and get people engaged in that process?”