Founder Stories: Sean Simpson, Founder and CSO of LanzaTech

Good evening everybody. Let me introduce myself. I'm Kevin Taft, and I'm the director of the Energy Centre at the Business School. And let me welcome everybody to the Business School and to our final series, Energy Matters 2014. And before introducing tonight's speaker, let me just again, once again, acknowledge the tremendous support that the Energy Education Trust has given us over the, over the period. Now, Dr. Sean Simpson is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Lanzatec, and Sean has a PhD from the University of York. Now, I'm not sure, is it in chemistry or chemical engineering?

No, it's in tomatoes.

And his interest in bio-developments led him to work in research facilities in Japan, Switzerland, Vienna, before coming to New Zealand where he worked on ethanol production from hardwoods. Um, Genesis, I believe. And Lenzatec was founded in 2005. Sean told us today that he has led 4 funding rounds associated with bringing Lanzatec to commercialisation, which I guess we will hear about in the presentation that's ahead of us. Harvey Week also mentioned tonight that Lanzatec is ranked number 1 in the bio— in bio—

clean tech 100.

There you go, 101 of the clean tech energy industries in the United States. So that's an amazing accomplishment for a New Zealand-born company. Landatech's now based in Chicago, and Sean travels back to New Zealand frequently, and he is a really passionate supporter of commercialisation in the biotech space. So please welcome Sean to the Institute.

First, I should thank Basil wholeheartedly for the invitation and Amanda Staines for the amazing coordination. And then clarify that my PhD really was in tomatoes, so there was a time when I was one of the 10 world's experts on how a tomato fruit ripens, which turns out to be not very interesting. So, true story. So the talk today, the talk today The talk today is— so you have to bear with me on this. So I arrived this morning at 5 AM. I slept a bit on the plane, so I left Chicago yesterday. So I'm kind of high on coffee and tired, and I've never really given this talk, so I'm not really sure how this is going to go. But effectively, I'll present a little about climate change. We don't have to present a great deal about climate change these days, which is great. I'll talk then about the sustainable fuels industry such as it is, really not so much from the perspective of technology, more from the perspective of feedstocks. I'll then present Landatech and do that in a completely shameless way. And then I'll talk a little bit about the aviation industry and why renewable sustainable fuels are important to the aviation industry particularly. And I'll finish off with some sort of rambling thoughts on what's next and what to think about from my personal perspective. So here it goes. So carbon, carbon, it's kind of everywhere. We're all carbon in this room, hopefully. We can't live without it, but we know, of course, that it's problematic when we burn it. It's problematic because when we burn carbon-containing materials, we end up releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. It's accumulating in the atmosphere now to a point where it's becoming dangerous to human health. It's becoming environmentally extremely troublesome, and it's gonna have serious economic impacts as we go forward. But not only that, Perhaps in many areas of the world, perhaps the most immediate impact of the combustion of carbon-rich materials is actually pollution, so the release of SOx, NOx, et cetera, and particulate matter that are now really choking up the air in many cities, and that's becoming one of the major drivers and the major urgencies around environmental legislation. As I said, climate change is happening. It's very clear. No need to talk about it. It's like we don't need to argue about this the same way we don't have to argue about evolution. And we know that, of course, the energy sector, the fuel sector in particular, the use of fuels and our reliance on fuels is something that's going to have to change as we go forward and we're going to have to find more sustainable fuels to fuel our vehicles because the combustion of fuels releases CO2, and therefore we have to find some ways of producing fuels that have a lower, much lower CO2 profile. And in fact, the International Energy Agency is putting figures around this saying, you know, really what we've got to do is displace at least 30% of our fuel pool with low-carbon fuels. They say zero-carbon fuels, but we're talking low-carbon fuels for at least 30% of our fuel pool. What does that mean? What does that mean in practical terms? And what's the challenge associated with this? What this means is that we've got to find 450 billion gallons of very low-carbon fuels fast. And this is a number I'm going to keep coming back to. And this number is derived from the fact that today, as a globe, we consume around 90 million barrels of oil per day. Consume, burn, and that all goes in the atmosphere, and it's becoming problematic. 30% of that is 1.2 billion gallons, let's call it, or 450 per day, or 450 50 billion gallons annually. So that's a pretty serious target. And the seriousness of that target and the reason for me to focus this talk on feedstocks for renewable fuel production will become evident as a function of that target. Of course, the use of sustainable fuels is being incentivized globally. So governments are mandating that we need to include low carbon or sustainable, actually what they're saying is biofuels. And we'll come back and I'll keep pounding on this word biofuels and you'll see me highlight it in red in this talk. And there's a reason for that and we'll come to that at the end. But the point of this slide is to say governments are mandating the use of sustainable fuels. And that, of course, is a great thing because it's driven an industry, driven an awareness, and driven a market for these fuels in many, many different countries. Around the world. Today, we really only have a limited number of routes via which we can produce low-carbon or sustainable or biofuels. We have the fermentation of either— of basically sugars, carbohydrates, sugars, into fuel ethanol, or we have the conversion of oils into biodiesel. And I'll talk about the relative numbers, but, but let's be clear, these are the only mature technologies that we have available today. That's all we got right now. And I'll present that industry, but we are developing processes that allow us to access a broader array of feedstocks, and they include lignocellulose. I'll present a little on that. Waste gases, and that's the Lanzatec process and algae. And between them, the use of these different feedstocks is being looked at in the context of both transport fuels for ground transportation and aviation. I'll start with ethanol, world's favorite biofuel. It's produced in huge volumes around the world, relatively, and it's produced It really is produced globally. And if you look at a graph like this, you'd be thinking that it's made from all sorts of materials in all sorts of different places. In reality, at least half of the fuel ethanol in the world is made from corn in the US. Around a quarter is made from sugar in Brazil. And the rest is made from wheat or cassava or sugar beet. But these are produced in relatively small amounts compared to corn in the US, sugarcane in Brazil. And so in the US, the production stands at around 13-point-something billion gallons, and in Brazil at around 6-point-something billion gallons per annum. So we're starting to get a sense. If we go back to our number, our number is 450 billion gallons per annum. We're starting to get a sense of the mountain we still need to climb. Biodiesel is made today primarily from canola or rapeseed oil, soy oil, some palm oil. Actually, when I was preparing for this talk, I was surprised at how little is actually produced from palm, given the degree of controversy around the use of that feedstock. The majority is made from rapeseed oil. But the total global production today sits at around 5 billion gallons. Now, you'll notice that the feedstocks I've been presenting up until now are all basically farmed foods. These are the products of agriculture, and they are both expensive and they are price volatile. So this is actually two graphs that present corn prices versus ethanol. Corn is in the blue, ethanol's in the— whatever that color is, gold. And in the US from— where are we here? From '09 to early this year. And this here is world sugar prices. The world is the red and the US is in blue. The point being is that these prices are highly volatile. They've become increasingly volatile recently, which is interesting, and I'll show some data later that will go some way to explain that, I believe. But the point is they are price volatile. They are expensive. They're price volatile. And they come with this incumbence of forcing us to make a decision between the dinner plate and the fuel tank. So this is not an argument that's going to go away. This is a real argument. And, you know, it's a reality for these fuels. If we're going to scale renewable fuel production, we can't do it at the expense of food. And why can't we do it at the expense of food? Right now, 18%, nearly 20% of sugar in the world is used for fuel production. So think about— let's go back to our numbers here. So sugar today produces— what was that? 6-point-something billion gallons, and our target's 450 billion gallons per annum. And right now we're using, let's call it a fifth of the sugar harvest for fuel production. Yeah, I'm no math genius, but we're not going to get there with sugar. So this is a question of feedstock. This is a discussion about feedstocks and what feedstocks we can use for the production of fuels. The other staggering thing here is, of course, that our population isn't going down globally. Our population is going up, and our demand for fuel is going up. Over the same time period that we're talking for— that people predict the world's population is going to go from 7 billion to 8.6 billion— over that same time period, people predict— the prediction is that the demand for energy is going to go up by around 40%. So our 450 billion gallons per year number is a target that's moving, and it's moving in one direction. And I talked a little bit about the price volatility. This probably explains to some degree the price volatility and what you see. This just stops in 2008. I couldn't— this is obviously a talk that's been made by Google. But what I'm just highlighting here is the dramatic impact that legislation's had on global biofuel production. This represents both bioethanol and diesel over recent times. And obviously the production's gone significantly up. For all the reasons mentioned around the mandates, but also the drive around climate change. But of course, where we got to, despite this dramatic uplift in production, we've got to 6% of our target of 450 billion gallons annually. So we need other ways. So right now we have a feedstock challenge. We need to be able to use new feedstocks, new inputs for fuel production, low-carbon fuel production. We need technologies, because today's technologies are clearly not enough because they access feedstocks that we need to eat and we don't need to drive on. And ultimately, of course, the lowest-cost technology will dominate reality. So one of the ideas that's been kicking around for a very long time— I remember going to biofuel conferences 10 years ago, Everybody was tremendously excited about lignocellulose. I go to this conference every year, and every year the conference would finish with, "Guys, we're going to be constructing a facility that makes ethanol from lignocellulose in the next 2 years." Every year we'd say that for the last 10 years. Turns out this year we were right. This year we really did build some facilities doing this. The point I wanted to make here is, what is lignocellulose? Lignocellulose is basically any plant that's not either an algae or a moss. So any plant that stands up more than an algae or a moss is made of lignocellulose, lignin plus cellulose. It's basically 60% cellulose. Cellulose, think of cellulose as a chain of sugar. So it's a sugar polymer, carbohydrate polymer. Hemicellulose, same thing. Lignin is effectively the closest thing that grows that looks like coal. Plants have evolved over millions of years, unfortunately, to have these two things intrinsically bound together and inseparable as a defense against the world. Our challenge when we want to use lignocellulose as a raw material for fuel production is the first step is to separate this thing that has spent billions of years evolving to become an inseparable mass. So first challenge, separate it. Then, saccharification. What does saccharification mean? It means chopping the cellulose into monomeric sugars, and then we ferment the same way we ferment any kind of sugar. So separation, saccharification, and fermentation. Those are the 3 challenges that we as a scientific or technical community have faced around the use of lignocellulose, woody biomass, for fuels. A plant that uses lignocellulose looks something like this, whereby obviously you have aggregation of the lignocellulose, and they tend to concentrate on single or individual types of biomass. They'll tend to concentrate on a particular type of grass. Corn stover is a popular one, obviously, in the States because it's the stuff left behind after a field of corn has been harvested. They'll concentrate on a particular type of biomass. They'll have a pretreatment that involves blasting apart the lignin and cellulose. Then they'll have an enzymatic treatment to break that cellulose down into monomeric sugars, and then a standard fermentation, which has to overcome the various difficulties of having this kind of mishmash of a feedstock that's kind of got bits of the breakdown products of lignin in there, and there's all kinds of inhibitors. There's been a number of challenges faced along the way, but these have been overcome. And this year, by some bizarre coincidence, 3 lignocellulose-to-ethanol plants have been constructed and will, and by the end of this year will be operational. Those 3 are by DuPont in Nevada, Abengoa, a Spanish company originally actually, but built a place in Kansas, Project Liberty— don't you love that name— in Iowa, and that's DSM. DSM is an enzyme manufacturer, so they're supplying the sort of microbial and enzymatic technology, and POET are a dyed-in-the-wool corn ethanol manufacturer who are trying to get into the lignocellulosic space. These guys have done it. They've constructed plants. Now these are the first of a kind. So these aren't going to be the most efficient plants in the world. They're not going to be the best plants in the world. This is the first stake in the ground saying we can convert wood into fuels at a reasonable scale. What do we mean by reasonable scale? We're talking about 30 million gallons, 25 million gallon kind of scale. Now this is small for a corn ethanol plant. Corn ethanol plants today are 100 million gallons. That's what you'd build if you're building a corn ethanol plant today. But we're not expecting to start off with the 100 million gallon scale. We're expecting to start off something a little more modest because we're trying to perfect the technology. The challenges that face this industry still, and again, an industry starts, it doesn't start from with the most efficient process in the world, the most cost-reduced process in the world. It starts with a process that works and then it gets better. And so the challenges these guys face are around the operational cost, the cost of buying the biomass, of breaking it apart, and of digesting it. The capital costs— some of the capital costs here that have been reported are high. So we're talking $10 an annual gallon. So you think about a plant producing 30 million gallons a year, that's $300 million to build that plant. Now that's significantly more expensive than a corn ethanol plant of equivalent volume. Breadth, so the ability to access a breadth of lignocellulosic resource, a breadth of feedstocks. They tend to be very, very specific, and the technologies they develop to process feedstocks are very specific to individual plant species. And yield. The yield is also always going to be challenged by the fact that 40% of your feedstock cannot be used for fuel production, that 40% being the lignin component of that feedstock. And so that right now is generally just burned for power. So those are the challenges, but we've got the journey started and the process of reducing these costs and overcoming some of these challenges has really begun. This is a tremendously exciting time. Fuels from algae oil. There's a number of players in this game. Sapphire and— I say Solazyme with some trepidation, I'll explain that— are two companies. Here, of course, this is addressing a problem at its source. This is taking CO2 directly out of the atmosphere and fermenting and converting that CO2 into an oil or into and alcohol, as I'll present next, using energy from sunlight. So it's photosynthesis for the production of either an oil that can be used for biodiesel or jet, or an alcohol that can be used— that's ethanol— that can be used to displace gasoline. It's great because, of course, it's directly using CO2 as the carbon source for fuel production. Tremendous. No competition with food or feed, tremendous, and can use CO2 that's come straight from a source like a coal-fired power station. Great. I say I approach Solazyme with some trepidation because Solazyme are always in the news about the fact that they're using algae to produce fuels. The fact is they use algae, but they feed them with sugar. So this is not a traditional algal process. Cyanobacteria are the other— don't you love this name? Algenol. We don't use algae. We use a cyanobacteria, a bacteria, a photosynthetic bacteria. So there's 2 companies in this space, 2 major companies, and there's others. These are just examples, Algenol and Joule. And both use a cyanobacteria. A photosynthetic bacteria that doesn't accumulate oils to the degree of an algae. What it does is produce ethanol, and that ethanol is secreted into the media. And unlike algae, you're using CO2 directly. You're avoiding any impact on arable land or food. And so from that perspective, this is great. This is a technology that's a way off, though. And some of the reasons for for the distance to commercialization here are the fact that we've got to overcome some serious challenges around water. So these are organisms that grow in water, and you've got to separate your product from water. The lipids have to be separated from water. You've got to dewater a lot of stuff to get at your lipids. The alcohol has to be separated from a lot of water. They tend to produce alcohol at very low concentrations in water. Land is a major issue. We're talking 7,000 gallons, let's call it 7,000 gallons, some of the numbers I've heard, of fuel production per acre. So now let's think about our modest ethanol plant at 30 million gallons per annum, and again, math isn't my thing, but I'm thinking that's a big number. So land is an issue, and then location. Yeah, so you've got to find a location that's sunny, that has a major source of— and a major source of CO2. And so this is not something that's going to be applicable in large swathes of Northern Europe or Russia or North America. This is not a technology that's suitable for places with low incident sunlight. Highly suited to Middle East or deserts in Australia, for example. But there's some good places to do this. In terms of feedstock, directly using CO2, algae, lignocellulose, we're on the road. I'll talk about Lanzatec and you'll understand a little bit about why I've focused on feedstock because Lanzatec was a company— our company was founded not on the basis of a technology, but actually founded with a feedstock philosophy, if you like. It sounds very grand, but it was a conversation in a pub about what's the best thing from which to produce a sustainable fuel. And we didn't know what it was, but we had a list that kind of described it. So Richard and I, who founded the company, we sat down and we said, right, what would be the ideal feedstock? What would it look like? And 3 pints in, this is the list. It's a feedstock that's available today. So we're not planting new crops. That was one of the big bugbears. We were both plant scientists. Didn't want to have to go into crop science. It was available today. It's available in very high volumes. It's abundant. You're not making— small quantities of fuel aren't interesting. It has to be point source. What does that mean? It has to be something that's available in a single location. We didn't want to have to deal with transport costs. Transport costs are a real big feature of any biomass, whatever it is, corn, lignocellulose, to fuel process. Because there's a tyranny of distance. You get to a certain distance, a certain radius around your plant that you can no longer afford to transport those crops over.. So is that, was that 10 miles, is it 100 miles? Whatever it is, you've got a radius and that defines your capture area. So point sourced, if everything's available in a single location, you're better off. Low value, turns out no one likes paying a lot for fuel. Can understand that. And so we didn't want to be in the situation of turning gold into silver. And non-food, of course, been talking about non-food, makes sense. And so when you get this list together, what you realize that you're talking about is waste materials. We're talking about industrial waste gases, we're talking about municipal solid waste, we're talking about agricultural waste, all of which fit those criteria and all of which are either available right now or can be easily converted into gases. Industrial waste gas obviously exists as a gas. Both municipal solid waste and, for example, agricultural residues can be gasified to produce a gas, and that gas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Steel mill off-gases, for example, are pretty much only carbon monoxide, whereas gasified biomass, gasified municipal solid waste is various mixtures of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. So then we had this challenge, so then we had this problem. Okay, so we've defined what we need to do. We want to convert gases into fuels and chemicals, how do you do that? And we're plant scientists, so we instantly avoided any kind of plant-based technology because we knew that wouldn't work. So we went on this sort of hunt for a biology, a microbiology that could do this. And this hunt is really a kind of hunt through time. So here's the history of the Earth here. This is the part of the talk that's the history lesson. History of the Earth. So Earth is formed 4.8-something billion years ago. Then we have the dinosaurs. So they came along sort of 400 million years ago, and they hung around for a while. They sort of left again about 100 million years ago for reasons unknown. And then we came along sort of 60 million years ago, just to sort of put it all in perspective. So this— Didn't happen, yeah? Okay. It disturbs me, this woman looks like Sarah Palin. So over this period, over this period, the Earth's had 3 atmospheres. We started off with a very reduced atmosphere, and the really awake people in the audience are starting to get a clue here. Then we went to the carbon dioxide atmosphere, and then through the evolution, of photosynthesis, we have— we now luxuriate in our oxygen-rich atmosphere, but, of course, we're busily trying to get back to that former atmosphere that we liked so much, the carbon dioxide-rich one. But life on Earth is thought to have begun around 3.8-ish, 3-point-something. I mean, who's really sure, give or take a billion years ago. And it's thought to have begun in a certain type of hydrothermal vent deep in the ocean where there's a confluence of various metal ions, hot gases, and gases that are both energy-rich. So you've got carbon monoxide, you've got methane, you've got hydrogen, you've got hydrogen sulfide coming together with these various metals. And this heat, and in this kind of cauldron, if you like, in the deep primordial sea, complex molecules started to form. Complex molecules started to form with regular patterns. Those regular patterns started to interact, and slowly, over a very, very, very, very long period of time, these evolved into the early organisms, and these early organisms used gases as their sole source of carbon and energy. The first organisms were gas eaters. The earliest biochemistry was one that allowed gases to be utilized as a source of both carbon energy, carbon and reducing equivalents. And it's this biochemistry that is still found today in certain organisms. These organisms are called acetogens that we leverage in our process. And these organisms are able to use quite flexibly different mixtures of both carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And that allows us to quite flexibly offer a way of producing fuels from various feedstocks, from industrial waste gases through municipal solid waste through to agricultural waste. And the really good news is, of course, that the primordial sea looked a bit like some of the places I get to visit. So this is a picture of a steel mill anywhere you like in the world. And it is an environment that's filled with carbon monoxide, hydrogen carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and methane. And all of these are manna from heaven for an acetogenic bacteria. So we've developed a process, and by developed, I mean we developed both the biology and the engineering to scale up a process that allows gases to be used as the sole source of carbon energy for fuel production. And in the first instance I'm talking about, fuel ethanol. I'm talking about ethanol, but we also produce a 4-carbon chemical called 2,3-butanediol, which I can't remember if I mentioned here, but we do. Just quickly, part of the history of the company. We've been very lucky in raising funds. The company was founded in 2005. I think one of the things that we've done, we've been lucky, we've had a good opportunity to do, and we've done very aggressively, is patent our technology. When we entered this space, there were, I think, 5 or 6 patents in the area of gas fermentation, and we went in very aggressively and patented very hard. And I guess one of the things I find myself banging on about is that patenting is something that here in New Zealand we need to do much better. And so that's a take-home, if you like. Our CEO is Dr. Jennifer Holmgren. She joined the company in in 2010 and really took what at that time was an interesting technology through to becoming a very exciting, sort of close-to-commercial process. And it's been a real privilege to be part of the journey with Jennifer. Our process has been proven with industrial off gases, with reformed methane, with gasified municipal solid waste, biomass. And in future, we are looking at the use of CO2 as a source of carbon and alternative sources of energy such as hydrogen or even electrons, and I'll mention that briefly later on. As I said, our organism produces this peanut here. That's the organism. It produces both ethanol and 2,3-butanediol, and we can toggle between the two. So we can operate the process such as we increase selectivity for ethanol or we increase selectivity for 2,3-butanediol. And that's without modification in the first instance. We scaled the process up, so we started off with the process in the lab with a test tube, an organism that we bought from a culture collection. We selected for strains that performed, had improved performance, and we scaled up firstly in our lab at sort of 5 or 10-liter scale, then to a pilot plant that we built in the steel mill at Glenbrook in New Zealand. In New Zealand? In Glenbrook. We're in New Zealand. And in 2008, frankly, we had no idea what we were doing then. Imagine, we started off in 2005 with a test tube and no idea what we were doing, and then in 2008, we built a pilot plant. We definitely had no idea what we were doing. But it was very, very successful because whilst we had no idea what we were doing, we'd built something that was of a decent size And we had to fix it. We had to overcome the challenges. And we had to overcome the challenges in the context of a gas that came from a steel mill and in the context of scale and not in the context of a beautiful white lab, white-coated lab with everything looking immaculately clean. And it turns out that when you bring a Chinese steelmaker over from China and you introduce him to this process that's going to transform his steel industry and you take him into your beautiful lab and you show him this bubbling reactor, He looks at you like you're mad. Like, "What the fuck has this got to do with me?" It's like, "I don't know, I don't get it. How does this work?" Then you take him to the steel mill where it's filthy and noisy and horrible, and he loves it and he gets it, 'cause there's the steel mill and there's your process and it's working. And so it became probably our greatest marketing tool as much as our learning ground for scale-up. We then scaled up to a pre-commercial demo, which we've actually operated 2 of these. In China. We operate another demo in Taiwan, and this year we will be breaking ground, touching all things wooden, with our first commercial operation. We focused on the steel industry in the first instance. Why did we do that? Because there was a steel mill in New Zealand that wasn't a gasifier, and so we had access to steelmaking off-gases, and we were desperate to make our process relevant to an established available feedstock and our feedstock view of the world. Steel industry is interesting. 300 billion gallons of ethanol capacity, go back to our number. That's annual ethanol production potential from the steel industry alone. Now that assumes lots of things like we get to build a plant at every single steel mill in the world and use all of their gas, which is unlikely, but that's the potential. It's tremendous. Formed 2 joint ventures in China with 2 major steel companies. Baosteel, probably the largest steelmaker in China, and Shougang, 4th largest steelmaker in China, both using different off gases decided to build— or different gas sources decided they wanted to build a demonstration plant. And we've operated those in the last 2 years. And they, in each case, hit the ball out of the park in terms of operations. And actually, I don't know of another process where the demo actually performed beyond its spec, and that was really satisfying. And not that it was easy. It was horrible, but we did it, and here's some data. And this is probably why I'm nervous about the camera, but this is 2 months of data, continuous production at one of our plants, What I wanted to show here was not that, OK, we've been producing for 2 months continuously from a real live feed from a steel mill. What I wanted to show is actually that shit happens. And when you're operating a plant in the real world at scale from a process that you developed at a tiny test tube in a laboratory, you have no idea what you're going to face when you get to the real world. Because it turns out— this is very frustrating— that the steel mill doesn't actually operate its mill to help you. They just want to make steel. And so they keep turning the thing off when it suits them, or changing the process, or having a new contaminant in the gas that they didn't tell you about. And so when you're operating there continuously for 2 months, you get to experience all of this stuff. And if you've got a great team, which fortunately we do, we're able to overcome those challenges as they occur. We have another operation in Taiwan, same sort of thing. We have also dedicated a lot of effort to maximizing the efficiency of the process such that we consume the maximum amount of gas in our specialized bioreactor in a single pass. Very, very important because you don't want to be recycling gas, you want to be consuming it all in one go. So now we can actually consume sort of over 90% of the feed gas in a single pass in our reactor. I won't talk about that now. Environmental impact. We have a CO2 impact. We also have an impact— and I'll talk about the CO2 impact later— but one of the things I think is really important that from a— and I mentioned this earlier— is in places like China and the major cities in China, the driver for environmental legislation turns out not to really be global warming. It turns out to be the fact that the air's toxic. And so you've got to deal with air pollution before you deal with anything else. And legislation has to be put in place to deal with that, and it's going to be. And one of the things that we've been promoting, of course, is that our process really does that. From the steel industry, the steel mill today has— obviously, it makes steel, it produces a bunch of gases. It can use those gases for electricity generation. And feed the grid, or it can use those gases in a process like ours. Our process allows 33% less CO2 to be emitted per megajoule of energy recovered. That's a good thing. But it also allows 80% fewer particulates and 40% less NOx to be emitted from that steel mill. So now you're really talking about having an impact on the immediate environmental issues that are associated with large-scale industrial production. Greenhouse gas. All of our carbon life cycle analysis are done by third parties. We've had these validated by the Roundtable for Sustainable Biomaterials, and we see a 50% to 70% reduction in greenhouse gases, CO2 emission, through the use of ethanol to displace gasoline, obviously displace oil from our process. And of course there's a good economic case such that we can offer 2x the revenue per volume of gas processed that can be generated from power generation. We have a route to chemicals. I won't spend too long on this, but the 2,3-butanediol can be used as an intermediate for the production of 1,3-butadiene, 1,3-butadiene is a very large— or is a chemical intermediate used for the production of rubber. So it's a market around $22 billion a year. And we have partnerships with the likes of SK, Invista, and a company called OraChem to process 2,3-butandiol into 1,3-butadiene and supply it to Invista, who are the world's major the world's largest nylon producer. And we have a focus on synthetic biology to engineer the microbe to allow us to produce new and exciting materials from the same gas resources that we can access. And I think this is something we've put a lot of effort into. We've made great progress. The natural microbe makes ethanol and 2,3-butandiol. Now we can offer the production of, for example, isopropanol. Which is a precursor for propylene, polypropylene plastics, acetone, butanol, 3-HB, so on and so forth. The list goes on. So today we've produced around 20 different molecules from this organism by engineering the pathways in the organism to redirect carbon into new products. This to me is tremendously exciting. Why is it exciting? We're able now, if we're producing, for example, plastics from these gases, we're talking about carbon capture and utilization, carbon capture and monetization. Carbon becomes a feedstock, a real feedstock. And carbon monoxide is very clearly the precursor to carbon dioxide. Carbon monoxide only ever ends its life as carbon dioxide. Basically from an industrial source. And so if you can monetize carbon, if you can fix carbon in materials, that's a huge win. Aviation. This is an industry that desperately needs a biofuel. Why does it desperately need a biofuel? Because I would suggest that no one in this room will get into an electrically powered plane. We can see electric-powered cars. Got it. Yeah, I can trust that. Electrically powered plane, no way. And they get that. No one's talking about electrically powered planes for that very reason. But also, and so this is an industry that, what's that, a fully loaded 747 consumes 16 tons of fuel taking off. So the volumes are big. And so the price of their gas is volatile and legislation is coming in place right now to penalize that industry, particularly in Europe that industry is being penalized. And so they're motivated now to ensure, and I've got to get the wording of this right, they have a formal commitment to have carbon-neutral growth by 2020. What does that mean? That as that industry grows, that their footprint will not grow with it. And so they're desperate to find routes to new fuels. There's a bunch of routes that that are out there. These are depicted here. Sasol were the first to develop a new type of gas that didn't come— sorry, a new type of aviation fuel that didn't come from gasoline, but it did use coal or natural gas. Keyur, a company in the States, developed a pyrolysis technology. They've gone through some rough, rocky times recently, but they have a pyrolysis process to basically take wood turn it into an oil that can be upgraded to aviation fuel. The algae guys, of course, want to use their oils for aviation fuel. And then you have the alternative alcohol producers, such as Gevo and Cobalt, who are fermenting sugars into butanol, isobutanol, and n-butanol respectively, and ourselves, who are all looking at alcohol to jet, a new process, ATJ. And we're looking to certify that process in order to produce high volumes of jet fuel for the aviation industry. I should quickly mention here Amyris. Amyris are a company, again, they're fermenting sugars to produce a 15-carbon molecule called farnesine. This fascinating picture here, apparently that's farnesine. And they're doing this in collaboration with Total. They did a flight this year with a Gol, I don't know if that's what you call them, Gol, Brazilian airline. Flying from Atlanta— no, Orlando— to São Paulo in a plane using fuel that was 10% farmazine. So that's on its way. I wanted to quickly talk about ATJ, alcohol-to-jet. That's a process that we're heavily involved in looking to certify, as are GEBO and Cobalt. They're using butanol. We're using ethanol. The alcohol is produced by our respective technologies, and then that alcohol is dehydrated, oligomerized— so made into a chain— and hydrogenated and turned into a jet. The really good news is that the guys who certify jet fuel are pretty meticulous. It's a 2-year process. I fly a lot, so I'm quite happy that they spend a lot of time making sure the fuel's good. And we're going through that process now to certify a process for the production of jet fuel from alcohols, the ATJ, alcohol-to-jet process. And we're about, I think, two-thirds of the way through that certification track now. Our partner— oh, sorry. Our fuel looks very good. So the way you get this thing certified is, one, you get the fuel analyzed. It meets a bunch of specs. Then you go through engine testing at various scales using various volumes. Look for batch consistency, etc. This is just a slide showing that the properties of the fuel produced from ethanol match those that the ASTM recommended or deemed necessary for a jet fuel. We can do this because we can produce fuel ethanol at very low cost, and obviously what we're looking to do is take ethanol molecules and join them end to end. So the final single molecule of jet fuel will be multiple molecules of ethanol joined together. And you can only really make that pay if you can produce the ethanol at low cost at the front end. And we've got some good partners on this. We have Virgin Atlantic as an offtake partner. And they're committed to buy whatever jet fuel we produce through this process. So a few closing thoughts. I've still got 2 minutes. A few closing thoughts. Policy. So this is where I'll talk about bio. What's bio got to do with anything? Why biofuel? Why do we care that a fuel is made from biomass? Personally, I think it's— my personal view is it's a kind of misguided focus. It's a very easy thing to sell politically, but it doesn't make any sense because actually what we want to do is not consume biomass for the production of fuel. What we want to do is produce a fuel that emits less carbon. So we should be talking about low-carbon fuels. We shouldn't be talking about biofuels. We should be much more— policy should be much more technology agnostic in its approach to this space, allowing innovators to develop fuels that allow less or that result in less or fewer carbon emissions. Today, for example, we can produce electricity very cheaply without terminal carbon production. Solar today in many geographies is competitive with electricity produced from coal. Carbon is needed not for electricity production. It's not— therefore, we can detach CO2 emission from electricity production to some degree in some places. But it is needed for chemicals. It is needed for energy-dense fuels that are in aviation. And our view is that we should think about recycling carbon. We don't think about— We think about recycling plastic bottles. We don't think about recycling carbon. And that needs to become part of our lexicon. It doesn't matter what that says. Our process does that. With every ton of fuel ethanol we produce from a steel mill, we avoid the emission of 1.8 tons of carbon, 3 kilograms of particulate matter and numerous kilograms of NOx and SOx. And this is why this is important. This is what the air is like in Auckland in terms of particulate matter in the air, PM2.5 level of 10. That's what Auckland is like and it's lovely. That's what it's like in Delhi, 152. This is what it's like in major cities in China, And so it's actually these issues are driving environmental legislation in these countries in the same way that they drove environmental legislation in Northern Europe and in the States in the earlier part of last century. Why bio? I keep making this point. Why bio? Bio is irrelevant. What is relevant is what the fuel— how the fuel performs. How the fuel performs in terms of its impact on CO2 emission. And so we as a society shouldn't care whether or not a farmer was employed to make a fuel that's low carbon because our aim is to avert climate change or slow climate change, and that's about low CO2. So this quickly. So one of the things that we're working on at Landstek is the direct use of CO2, and that's a process— this is a very, I suppose, cutting-edge process. We're doing this in collaboration with the University of North America. Electro-synthesis is the process whereby electrons can be used as a source of energy for CO2 fixation. These organisms can use electrons as a source of reducing equivalents and use CO2 as a source of carbon. It's exciting. It's earlier stage than algae, so it's more than 10 years away. In conclusion, therefore, my view is we need We need to have a— we need diversification. We need diversification of the energy options and we need diversification of the feedstocks that we access for the production of low-carbon fuels because the mountain we have to climb is measured in hundreds of billions of gallons of annual production of low-carbon fuels and the available the technologies we have today simply won't get us anywhere near that. They'll be an order of magnitude off. So we have to think. We have to think about diversification and we have to broaden our view as to how we approach the area of sustainable fuel production. Questions? I do like this.