Quote:
Climate technology startup Twelve took a major step towards producing sustainable aviation fuel on Thursday by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit.
The company will generate carbon credits for customers including Microsoft Corp. and Shopify Inc., in addition to producing clean jet fuel for Alaska Air Group Inc.
Twelve is one of a number of emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation.
Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company’s CO2 electrochemical reactor – called OPUS – will be at the center of its first commercial SAF production plant under construction in Moses Lake, Washington, that’s set to be completed later this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of SAF. Twelve’s airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions.
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https://www.spokesman.com/stories/20...up-fires-up-n/
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. They capture carbon from an ethanol plant, so they take something that had potential to be sequestered, and instead use green energy(could it have been used better elsewhere?) to run electrolysis ultimately creating a fuel that will be burned and release that captured CO2. Is this just a giant Rube Goldberg machine, or can they actually prove a net reduction in CO2(assuming the green energy could have been used elsewhere)? In a world of free surplus energy this would be one thing, and maybe they've done the math on this but it just doesn't make logical sense. Oh, and carbon credits, of course. Gotta grab those for green washing.