Aviation uses 100 billion gallons of fossil-based jet fuel each year, amounting to 3% of overall transportation emissions. In a warming world, that quickly adds up, but humans are not going to stop using this critical enabler of connection and commerce across the world. To meet our needs and reduce the environmental impact of flying, innovators have been hard at work to develop, produce and scale sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.
To that end, LanzaTech and LanzaJet have announced CirculAir™, a new joint offering that will bring together our two companies’ cutting edge technologies – carbon recycling and alcohol-to-jet – to make SAF from recycled waste carbon. This is a critical milestone in our efforts to advance a circular carbon economy in which carbon emissions are captured and continually reused to power the planes that take us where we want to go.
Ahead of the launch, our CEO Dr. Jennifer Holmgren and LanzaJet CEO Jimmy Samartzis sat down to discuss their career journeys, shared company histories, and how they’re working together to bring their joint vision to life. A lightly-edited transcript of their conversation is below, and you can listen to the CarbonSmart podcast episode on Apple, Spotify or wherever you receive your podcasts.
Text Transcript
Jennifer Holmgren:
Hi everybody. I’m Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, and it’s my pleasure to be on a podcast chatting with sustainable aviation fuel pioneer Jimmy Samartzis, who happens to also be the CEO and leader of LanzaJet. Jimmy, welcome.
Jimmy Samartzis:
Thanks, Jennifer. Such a privilege and honor to be doing this with you today.
JH:
Tell everybody a little bit about yourself and how you got to be such a player in the climate and decarbonization of aviation, and also how you came to LanzaJet and what you see as the future of sustainable aviation fuel.
JS:
You know, I’m going to take you back a little bit and it might be actually taking you further back than you might even know. And Jennifer, I think the audience probably realizes that you and I have had a long history together. What I would say is that my interest in environmental and climate issues goes way back for me. And, you know, one of the bits here that you may not know is I actually started the environmental club in high school. So this goes back to the early 90s and I only bring that up because you know, as we each have our careers over decades, you sometimes lose sight of what’s core to you. For me, I don’t know that I ever lost sight of it, right. But different parts of my career either had me closer to that or a little bit further away from it.
As I kicked off my professional career, I had the chance to work for some great, internationally known strategy consultancies. What’s interesting is every time I landed at one of them, my first projects were always environmental-related. One of the very first projects I got involved with was dealing with the watershed issues in South Florida. And then when I ended up at a different firm, I ended up starting the sustainability practice. I always gravitated back to my center, which was caring about climate change and caring about the environment.
I had the chance in 2007. I ended up at United Airlines in a strategy role working with and supporting the CEO. The opportunity I saw back then was to sort of address an urgent business need for the airline, which was how do we deal with the rising prices of crude oil, making it untenable for the airline to be financially successful while also then pulling in the opportunity for us to be a more sustainable company by looking at sources of fuel that were not crude oil. So it’s sort of brought together some of my long-term interests with my business interests as well. And in 2008 I really started pushing the airline towards thinking about alternative fuels as we called them back then or sustainable aviation fuel, as we call it today.
But if you think about this 14-, 15-year journey that I’ve been on at the very least going back to 2008, you know it’s been a long history of trying to figure out how do we build this ecosystem so that we can actually get to a place where we’re commercializing technologies that can have a meaningful impact on aviation. I’m fortunate to be in this role that I’m in today, which sort of brings together all aspects of my background and interests that enables me to have an impact in truly making progress in the industry on commercializing not only a technology but the production of sustainable aviation fuel.
JH:
It’s really nice to see your career trajectory and the focus you’ve always had on fixing, shall we say, and repairing our environment. What did you think when we approached you to be CEO of LanzaJet?
JS:
That call that I got from you to think about LanzaJet felt like it was a call I was hoping to get. That was nine years in the making or maybe 10 years in the making. You might remember that in your earliest days at LanzaTech, you and a couple of folks from your team – this is going back to 2010 or 2011 – visited me when I was at United and shared with me this idea that you had of being able to turn waste carbon and take carbon that’s above ground and sort of recycle it into making it to SAF. And you said, “hey, would you be interested if we were able to produce a product that came from that?” And I said yes, you know, how soon can we sign on to something like that? And your reaction was “well, give us time. We need to develop the technology.” So it sort of came back full circle, you know, hearing from you that the technology had matured to a point where it was ready to get deployed and had an opportunity to be scaled. It was pretty exciting for me and you know, I think what gave me the confidence was the trust I had in the work that I’ve seen from LanzaTech over the years to do what they said they were going to do.
And Jennifer, I alluded to the fact that you and I have a long shared history. You’ve had a lot of impact in shaping this industry and I think some have even considered you as the godmother of SAF helping us as an industry move forward in the earliest days when a lot of folks questioned whether or not this was ever possible. It would be great to chat through a little bit of your background and the origins of frankly the SAF industry.
JH:
So I’m feeling like the old woman in the room, but nonetheless, it’s been a great journey. I remember actually getting a call from a DARPA project manager and he said, “Jennifer, do you think that we could make a drop-in hydrocarbon aviation fuel?” Because if I use an oxygenate and everybody believed that every biofuel that you could ever make would have to have oxygen because it was ethanol, it was biodiesel. He said “I can fly from Cleveland to Cincinnati with a tank full of an oxygenate. I need to do more than that. Do you think you can develop a technology to allow a hydrocarbon, what people thought would be a drop-in at the time?” And I said, well, we can make diesel, jet fuel is not that different from diesel. It’s just a little bit different chemically and if you can make one, you should be able to make the other. That’s how my journey in aviation fuels started and trying to show that yes, in fact, you could make a drop-in, and yes, in fact, you could fly on it and it would have the energy density necessary to take you from Orlando to Gatwick.
That was a really important journey at the time and of course there were a lot of hurdles, not just the technology hurdles. We had the regulatory hurdles, we had to get ASTM approval for flying on something that wasn’t fossil carbon derived. All the definitions were fossil carbon derived and we worked with the aviation industry, yourself included, and aviation organizations to be able to not only make the fuel, but get it certified for flying. What I always found exciting is that phone call was in 2006 and by 2009, we were already flying on a drop-in replacement fuel and we had demonstration flights across the world with Boeing and Rolls Royce and General Electric. And we did all those flights, culminating with the flight of the Green Hornet. We went supersonic in 2010 on Earth Day, all within four years from “can anybody do this?” So to me, it’s been a really fun journey of showing that something that people did not think was possible was possible, that it required working together as an industry.
JS:
And Jennifer, you and I, I think independently and perhaps there were some that were together. We’ve had some amazing opportunities, I think to witness firsthand some of the historic firsts that have happened in the industry. What is perhaps your one or two most favorite things that you witnessed, events that you witnessed or milestones perhaps that you witnessed over the last 16 or 17 years that you’ve been doing this work?
JH:
I thought the flight of the Green Hornet was top of the class. That was really fun because it showed what sustainable aviation fuel could do and that it was really a drop-in. And I would have to say the first flight demo that I was part of with Air New Zealand.
My father was a mechanic for Avianca, the Colombian airline, and I used to crawl around their planes when I was a kid. When I got to doing this job, I started to get to crawl around their planes again. I got to be in simulators, testing the new fuel in ground tests, testing the fuel in the engines. I got to be on airplanes that did flight tests that I didn’t know people actually would want to do. Getting an engine that stalled up in the air starting again, for example, and I am super grateful to see that a career in science actually enables a young girl to grow up to do some really amazing things.
JS:
Some of the examples you shared are a reflection of what it takes to build an industry, and you’ve been also very key to helping to build these partnerships. Whether it was you know prior to your time at LanzaTech and certainly at LanzaTech since you arrived there, we’d love to hear a little bit about the nature of partnerships and what your perspective on that is in terms of what it’s taken to build this industry.
JH:
Well, it isn’t just because LanzaTech is a small company. Even when I worked with UOP, which is part of Honeywell, a massive entity, partnerships, especially with things like national labs, the Department of Energy. I already mentioned DARPA. These agencies help to put enough resources to accelerate work. You can always do new things. You always have license to do that in a small company or large company. The question is how quickly can you do it, right? Partnerships bring in knowledge and domain expertise and also it’s a battle of attrition, right? You have to convince immovable objects to move, and by doing it in partnership, there are many voices and many angles pushing the envelope. It’s an airline saying, “look, I can invest a little more in a small amount of aviation fuel because it’s a small part of my entire fuel budget, so I can help pull this industry along,” and that’s something you did when you were at United.
In thinking about the environment, we have run out of time, we just don’t have time to do things slowly and I don’t care what anybody says about “going alone, you go faster.” That’s ridiculous. Going alone, you cannot change anything because you cannot convince anybody by yourself. It takes a group of people to change things.
Thinking about the partnership angle to me, this is actually what brings us into this discussion today, and it’s really a partnership between LanzaTech and LanzaJet that you and I are forming to create a waste-to-SAF solution that is broadly applicable. And I want to get your thoughts on that. I want you to tell me a little bit about how you think about what we’re going to do together going forward.
“You have to convince immovable objects to move, and by doing it in partnership, there are many voices and many angles pushing the envelope.”
– Dr. Jennifer Holmgren
JS:
Yeah. So let’s, let’s maybe start by sharing with everyone, these two companies, LanzaTech and LanzaJet, are coming together, and we’re announcing a new joint offering, which we’re calling CirculAir™. You know, I think for me, what excites me about this is it brings together two phenomenal companies that have worked hard to commercially scale and make their respective technologies economically viable, and creates a solution that enables across a global industry and across a global footprint to be relevant in any market and to create a solution that is viable today and well into the future.
You know, for me, what’s pretty neat about this is it enables us to take nearly any waste resource and convert it to ethanol using the LanzaTech technology of gas fermentation and then from ethanol, we can take it to SAF using the LanzaJet technology. We know that this is a powerful combination of technologies that can bring a lot of value to the industry. So, whether it is under the banner of A-to-J [alcohol-to-jet] or under the banner of PTL – power to liquids – or e-fuels, the nice thing with this is we can get there using our combined LanzaTech and LanzaJet technologies with our new offering called CirculAir.
“[CirculAir] brings together two phenomenal companies that have worked hard to scale their respective technologies to create a solution that is commercially viable today and well into the future.”
– Jimmy Samartzis
JH:
And I would add, Jimmy, that I’m really excited about it from another perspective. One is the name because at the end of the day, we’re burning hydrocarbons in airplanes and we’ve gotta put it back into the cycle. And so the ability to take CO2 and someday CO2 that’s directly captured from the air, that could have been an emission from an airplane and converting it back to aviation fuel to me is really exciting. Now, I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, so I’m not gonna talk about things that are still 10 years in the making. But the technology that we will use then is available today with other resources, whether it’s municipal solid waste or CO2 from a flue stack or even recycled carbon. New technology always takes a long time to deploy. The process in the industry is about building the first one and then the second one, and then eventually getting to that very fast exponential growth part of the curve.
JS:
That’s absolutely true and super exciting as well. Jennifer, to be doing this with you in some ways, it feels like it’s been a long time coming where we can put all of our energy together and have this impact.
JH:
Can you speak to progress at Freedom Pines and any other updates that you have?
JS:
You may remember that when we started this company, it was in the middle of COVID. It was at a time when aviation as an industry had come to a screeching halt. Yet we were successful at bringing on airlines as investors in the company, and that to me was a testament to the type of folks that we were bringing on as partners to help us on this journey. We brought on folks who honestly believed in the broader good here that we were trying to accomplish by taking action today for a better tomorrow, if you will, and we’ve been following up on that since the very beginning. We’ve been building a team of investors that truly represent the entire value chain and even more recently, we were successful in bringing on some new strategic investors with folks like Southwest Airlines. We brought on Microsoft who has been a longtime supporter of ours and wanted to continue to be part of our story and invested in the growth of the company and more recently, we welcomed Group ADP, which is one of the world’s largest airport owners and operators.
You know, we’ve been very intentional about building a team that represents the entire ecosystem because that is what we need to be successful. All of this has ended up well for us. We’ve been very successful at deploying the technology at Freedom Pines Fuels and having that be the world’s first ethanol-to-SAF plant the world took notice, I would say. And just last week we had an amazing accolade from TIME magazine and were recognized as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Companies of 2024. Which, by the way, comes on the heels of LanzaTech being recognized as that in 2023.
“We’ve been very intentional about building a team that represents the entire [aviation] ecosystem because that is what we need to be successful.”
– Jimmy Samartzis
JH:
What makes LanzaJet’s SAF different from any other SAF developer? Why should a customer choose CirculAir or LanzaJet?
JS:
One of the things that I think is interesting and exciting about our technology, I often compare it to other technology pathways. You’re not starting with an oil, for example, that you’re having to break down and you get different cuts from it. You have a very basic molecule in that ethanol that we convert to ethylene and from ethylene, we can then build it into the carbon chains that we want to produce very selectively SAF and renewable diesel and there’s no other pathway out there that can achieve 90% selectivity to SAF like we can. I often refer to our technology as being purposefully built for SAF. And by the way, in that process we retain all of the energy in that ethanol molecule in the finished SAF product.
JH:
The scale of the challenges in aviation is great. As a sector, what are some of the largest barriers when it comes to deploying SAF at scale? How do you think partnerships influence these efforts?
JS:
Building this industry takes having an ecosystem that is working synergistically. You need to have it anchored by technology, yet you need government support and policy to get a new industry off the ground. You need airlines to have strong demand signals that they’re going to buy the fuel. You need financiers to invest significant amounts of capital. And you need your end users, or maybe your travelers – whether the individual or the corporates – to support flying more sustainably.
If you think about aviation on a global scale, you know aviation today uses more than 100 billion gallons of fossil-based jet fuel and decarbonizing aviation, for which, by the way, SAF is largely agreed by all, will contribute the most to that decarbonization net zero ambition by 2050. Then SAF is 65+% of that decarbonization ambition.
We have a long way to go if you think about where we are this year in 2024. In 2023, we only had about 150 million gallons of SAF produced. So, if you think about a 10% goal by 2030, call that, just to use round numbers, 10 billion gallons by 2030 and we’re sitting at 150 million gallons today, we’ve got a long way to go. I’m optimistic. I’m always optimistic but I’m an optimistic realist, I guess. Technology has to anchor the work that’s happening and that’s where I get excited about what we do at LanzaJet and what we do collectively with LanzaTech. The rest of it doesn’t matter if you don’t have technology that can actually create a drop-in fuel, and that’s where we have excelled as we’ve had technologies deployed commercially that work. So, when you think about the rest of that ecosystem, I think airline demand is clear. I think the challenge is will airlines pay the premium attached to this fuel and you have, you know, different interests across geographies on the global landscape, in terms of willingness to pay for that premium.
What is interesting is you have large corporates who fly on airlines stepping forward to pay for that premium. They pay for those environmental attributes and get to take that credit and are willing to pay for that premium to help get the industry off the ground. Governments have been super helpful. We’ve had support from the UK government, we’ve had support from the Australian government and the New Zealand government. We’re seeing a lot of interest from governments stepping forward, either with incentives or in some cases mandates and you know associated programs to support development of the industry.
Capital required to develop infrastructure is expensive. The key is how do we de-risk everything attached to a project so that financiers can feel comfortable to invest and deploy their capital. And this is where I think LanzaTech and LanzaJet shine, right. I think we have done a very good job of figuring out how to de-risk the technology. We are oftentimes feedstock constrained across the global marketplace and one of the things that this enables us to do is to find waste sources and convert them to ethanol and from ethanol to SAF, which is opening up a whole new opportunity for us on a global basis.
So going back to the financiers, you know, they like to see that feedstock is de-risked and that it’s not necessarily tied to government policy in order for you to be successful. And just one more example I’ll give you is you know we’ve had some great examples across the companies, but for LanzaJet in particular where we’ve been the recipient of innovative streams of funding. We were fortunate enough to be the recipient of Breakthrough’s very first SAF investment, and we’ve also been creative and working with partners like Microsoft on creating innovative structures around loans for our project in Georgia.
JH:
Thanks for joining me, Jimmy, on the podcast. More importantly, thank you for everything you’ve done for the industry and for getting us to this point. Let’s get more done.
JS:
Well, thanks Jennifer for giving me the opportunity to do this with you. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you, but we don’t often have the chance to talk about our shared histories and what we’re doing together to have an impact on the long term.
We’ve covered a lot. I think for me the most exciting thing is you know it’s been 15 plus years in the making to finally see us have a real shot at decarbonizing aviation. I’m super excited about what we’re doing here together with our technologies jointly and ultimately able to make a difference today and well into the future. Always good to chat with you.
