Chemical Engineering May 2022 - 18

INVESTOR INFLUENCE
Both individual and institutional investors
are becoming increasingly concerned with
environmental, social and governance
(ESG) criteria when making financing decisions,
and are demanding more information
about climate risks to which companies
may be exposed.
" Investors are putting growing pressure
on oil-and-gas companies to report their
'Scope 3' (end-use) emissions that come
from burning the wide array of petroleum
products refiners sell to consumers, " RMI's
Gordon says. " Publicly accounting for enduse
emissions is the first step to factoring
in their negative externalities - and rethinking
their business model, " she argues.
" Moreover, as demand wanes for certain
petroleum products (such as gasoline as
electric vehicles replace internal combustion
engines) and various renewable feedstocks
are converted into bio-based fuels,
refiners will be compelled to redesign their
processes. Factoring decarbonization into
these renovations will offer refiners a competitive
edge in the global marketplace, "
Gordon says.
In March 2022, the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC; Washington,
D.C.; www.sec.gov) proposed rule changes
(which are now open for comment) that
would require registrants to include certain
climate-related disclosures in their registration
statements and periodic reports, including
information about climate-related risks
that are reasonably likely to have a material
impact on their business, results of operations,
or financial condition, and certain climate-related
financial statement metrics in
a note to their audited financial statements.
The required information about climate-related
risks also would include disclosure of
a registrant's GHG emissions, which have
become a commonly used metric to assess
a registrant's exposure to such risks.
The proposed SEC rules would include a
phase-in period for all registrants, with the
compliance date dependent on the registrant's
filer status, and an additional phasein
period for Scope-3 emissions disclosure,
according to SEC.
❑
ech.com), announced a partnership
with Marquis Sustainable Aviation
Fuel in February 2022 to construct a
120-million gal/yr integrated sustainable
fuels plant at Hennepin, Ill. Using
the LanzaJet ATJ process, the plant
will employ on-site carbon capture
and sequestration and renewable
energy to produce SAF, resulting in
a lifecycle greenhouse gas reduction
of more than 70% compared to conventional
jet fuel.
And in January, LanzaJet announced
a $50-million investment
18
from the Microsoft Climate Innovation
Fund to support construction
of its Freedom Pines Fuels plant in
Soperton, Ga. The ATJ SAF production
plant is expected to achieve
mechanical completion in 2022 and
begin producing 10 million gal/yr
of SAF and renewable diesel from
sustainable ethanol, including from
waste-based feedstocks, in 2023.
Another ATJ technology is that of
Vertimass LLC (Irvine, Calif.; www.
vertimass.com), which originated at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a
way to lower the cost of converting
alcohols to hydrocarbons by utilizing
a single reactor. In February 2022,
Vertimass announced a collaboration
with U.S. biofuels maker World
Energy for the development of Vertimass
technologies for SAF and other
renewable fuels.
F-T synthesis
Still other SAF projects are looking
to utilize CO2 as a carbon-negative
feedstock for liquid fuels. Several
concepts reduce CO2 to CO, which
is then combined with hydrogen to
make synthesis gas (syngas). The
syngas can then be converted into
longer-chain alkanes using F-T synthesis,
and refined further into SAF or
other products.
A new development related to this
SAF pathway occurred in January
2022, when Johnson Matthey (JM;
London, U.K.; www.matthey.com)
launched HyCOgen, a process designed
to enable the production of
SAF from CO2. A new proprietary
catalyst, developed by JM engineers,
catalyzes the reverse water-gas shift
reaction, in which CO2 and H2 are
combined to generate CO and water.
Paul Ticehurst, JM senior business
development manager, says the new
catalyst has been integrated into a
process that provides a route to SAF
that consumes CO2 in a circular way.
The HyCOgen process is integrated
with the FT-CANs process,
co-developed by JM and bp plc, in
ways that maximize efficiencies to
make synthetic crude (F-T liquids),
which could then be upgraded by
refiners into SAF.
" JM has a deep and detailed understanding
of the water-gas shift reaction,
so we approached the challenge
of reversing the reaction as a
syngas-generating technology using
that foundational knowledge and applying
it to the new process, " Ticehurst
says.
Because the process is endothermic
and requires high temperatures,
JM engineered the metallurgy of the
process equipment to handle the
elevated temperatures reliably over
time, Ticehurst notes.
Ninety percent of the carbon in the
initial CO2 leaves the process in FT
liquids. " I think of HyCOgen as borrowing
molecules that we don't want
in the atmosphere and converting
them to a form that has an established
supply chain, " says Ticehurst.
" They are converted, used as fuel
and returned to the atmosphere, so
it's circular, and we get the power. "
The circular aspects of the technology
are maximized when the H2
used results from water electrolysis
powered by renewable energy.
Ticehurst reports " immense interest "
in the technology since the
January launch, and notes that JM
sold its first license for HyCOgen in
March. The deal will be announced
in the coming months.
F-T synthesis is also a key part of
solar fuels. Synhelion (Lugano, Switzerland;
www.synhelion.com) has
developed a proprietary process that
converts solar heat into syngas. This
syngas is then fed into a modular
synthesis plant and converted into
liquid fuels via Fischer-Tropsch.
Synhelion is currently implementing
an industrial-scale plant to produce
sustainable kerosene from
solar energy in Jülich in North RhineWestphalia,
Germany, and has
chosen Ineratec GmbH (Karlsruhe,
Germany; www.ineratec.de) as its
partner for the fuel production from
the solar syngas.
The partners plan to rapidly scale
their fuel production with support
from industry partners such as Swiss
International Air Lines and Lufthansa.
The F-T route also figures in a
power-to-fuels project in Germany,
directed by the carbon offset not-forprofit
organization Atmosfair (fairfuel.
atmosfair.de). Atmosfair is building
an e-kerosene plant in Emsland,
Germany that is capable of producing
carbon-neutral SAF.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM MAY 2022
http://www.vertimass.com http://www.vertimass.com http://www.sec.gov http://www.synhelion.com http://www.matthey.com http://www.ineratec.de http://www.lanzatech.com https://fairfuel.atmosfair.de https://fairfuel.atmosfair.de http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering May 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering May 2022
