Twelve broke ground today on the site of a defunct sugar beet refinery in Eastern Washington, marking the start of construction of what will be the company’s and the state’s first commercial-scale sustainable aviation fuel facility.
The Moses Lake plant is expected to produce up to 40,000 gallons of fuel annually to start, with the goal of increasing that more than 10-fold by the end of next year.
Twelve is based in Berkeley, Calif., but was attracted to Washington for its clean, affordable energy, said Ram Ramprasad, Twelve’s chief commercial officer. The state’s recently approved tax credits of up to $2 per gallon for the fuel are an added bonus.
The company has a growing presence in the region, last year signing a memorandum of understanding with Alaska Airlines and Microsoft to support the startup’s fuel production.
Washington is a long-time aviation hub and the sector is in pursuit of technologies to meet its carbon reduction goals, with commercial airlines committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is the quickest near-term climate fix as the cleaner fuel can replace jet fuel in existing planes. SAF proponents go further, viewing it as the main answer for powering long-distance flights given the shortcomings of other clean alternatives such as batteries and hydrogen.
“This is the only real solution to reduce the carbon footprint of aviation,” Ramprasad said.
But SAF so far is only a drop in the tank. It’s available in limited quantities and expensive, amounting to less than 1% of the aviation fuel used today.
This spring, SAF rival SkyNRG announced its plans to build a fuel production facility in Washington. It has not officially disclosed the location. State lawmakers also approved funding to create a sustainable aviation fuel R&D center in Everett.
Almost two years ago, President Biden announced the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge to boost production, aiming to manufacture 3 billion gallons of SAF annually year by 2030 and enough of the fuel to power all flights by 2050 — a volume estimated to be around 35 billion gallons per year.
Some environmental groups have balked at those ambitions. Most SAF being produced or under development today is made from biological feed stocks such as used cooking oil, agricultural and forestry debris, crops, and sewage and dairy waste. The sources are limited and not necessarily sustainable.
Twelve, however, wants to take a different approach.
‘Industrial photosynthesis’
As graduate students at Stanford University, Etosha Cave and Kendra Kuhl researched a scientific process known as carbon dioxide electrocatalysis. The idea is to use clean energy, novel chemical catalysts and specially designed hardware to convert CO2 into carbon-containing compounds, including aviation fuel.
The scientists teamed up with Nicholas Flanders, a Stanford MBA student, to launch their company in 2015.
The team describes their process as “industrial photosynthesis,” riffing on the process in which plants take carbon dioxide from the air and use sunlight and water to transform it into starches.
Twelve calls its product E-Jet given that it’s manufactured using clean electricity. The company says their product has “up to 90% lower lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions” than jet fuel made from fossil fuels.
For the commercial facility in Moses Lake, Twelve will use liquid ethanol produced in Washington as its carbon source and hydropower from local dams for energy. Other potential carbon sources include waste from area pulp and paper mills, Ramprasad said. The limiting factor isn’t carbon sources, he added, but access to clean energy.
Working with local partners, “it would be great to expand even more if we could,” Ramprasad said.
Twelve’s growth potential
The industrial process that Twelve uses is modular so the devices needed can be built elsewhere and dropped into the Washington facility. The startup plans to build a second production plant at the same Moses Lake location if all goes well.
Ramprasad is optimistic operations will be successful, but acknowledges challenges.
“There’s some risk in the timeline, for sure,” he said. “It’s the first time some of those technologies are coming together.”
Twelve has raised more than $200 million in venture capital and has more than 275 employees. Construction of the plant in Eastern Washington should provide around 200 jobs, the company said.
The business would like to set up at other sites in Washington, Ramprasad said. It’s also looking at spots in the middle of the U.S. in the “corn belt” where it could tap CO2 from fermentation. Or there are possibilities in Texas and Louisiana using renewable natural gas as a carbon source and wind and solar as a power supply.
The startup would like to one day use carbon dioxide that’s captured from the air to produce its fuel.
“When that becomes viable,” Ramprasad said, “there is no limit to scaling.”
