China Steel invests $46 million in LanzaTech

Following a successful demonstration of the technology, the board of directors of Taiwan’s China Steel Corp. has approved a $46 million capital investment in the construction of a commercial ethanol production facility using a gas fermentation process developed by LanzaTech (Roselle, IL). Construction of the 17 million gallon-per-year facility is scheduled to begin during the fourth quarter of 2015, with the expectation of subsequent scale-up to 34 million gallons per year sometime in the future. “The problem one always has in scaling is getting someone to agree to be the first,” LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren recently told Biofuels Digest. “We now have another partner that is interested in scaling our technology. When you license technology, you need to scale more than at one facility to get the revenues you need to become self-sufficient, and therefore having multiple units on track to scale up is important.” White Biotech, a joint venture between China Steel and LCY Chemical Corp., recently met ethanol production targets at a demonstration plant in Kaohsiung using steel mill off-gases for the gas fermentation process.