The Carbon Transformation Technology developed by California-based Twelve splits apart carbon dioxide (CO2) at low temperatures using electrochemistry, creating foundational elements for fuels, chemicals and plastics.Twelve, founded in 2016, has partnered for demonstration projects to produce the world’s first laundry detergent ingredients from CO2 with Procter &amp; Gamble, the world’s first car parts from CO2 with Mercedes Benz and, most recently, the world’s first e-jet fuel from CO2 with the United States Air Force. “As we’ve embarked on this journey, not only have we invented our technology, but we’ve also seen the right amount of investment and support from the right partners and customers,” says Ashwin Jadhav, vice president of business development at Twelve. “We’ve seen and participated in many sectors growing.”With so many potential applications, Twelve chose to focus first on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) because of its demand and impact, according to Jadhav and Nicholas Flanders, Twelve cofounder and CEO. SAF provides a ready market and customers with a strong drive to decarbonize, as well as incentives through state programs and the Inflation Reduction Act. But fundamentally, the technology is ideally suited for e-fuels, with its low-temperature process and ability to integrate with a variety of electricity sources, including (and preferably) renewables, Flanders says.Jadhav also emphasizes the immediate need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Aviation, he cites, accounts for 3% of global carbon emissions—1 billion tons of CO2 per year. Twelve’s e-jet SAF, made with CO2, water and renewable electricity, has up to 90% lower emissions than conventional jet fuel. “Pretty quickly after the Air Force demonstration announcement, we started to attract commercial airline customers,” Flanders says. Alaska Airlines is the first commercial airline partner and, along with Microsoft, already has off-take agreements in place for the e-jet fuel produced at Twelve’s first commercial-scale production plant, currently under construction in Moses Lake, Washington. “We’ve really anchored on SAF as a core product,” Flanders says.Cyclical Carbon Economy&nbsp;&nbsp; Though carbon capture has become a key piece of the solution to reducing emissions, Jadhav envisions a more circular, useful application. “At Twelve, we believe in taking that carbon and transforming it. That captured carbon goes back into the operational loop. So, we’re creating a cyclical carbon economy ... it thereby eliminates the reliance on fossil fuels, because you’re using the carbon dioxide as a feedstock.”Carbon Transformation Technology is a CO2 electrolyzer that uses renewable electricity, CO2 and water to produce carbon monoxide. That outputted carbon monoxide is added to hydrogen (also produced by Twelve through water electrolysis) to make syngas, what Jadhav calls a “foundational element.” To produce the e-jet fuel, that syngas is run through a Fischer-Tropsch reactor. The result is an ASTM-certified, drop-in fuel that will not need recertification.The Federal Aviation Administration currently caps SAF blending at 50%, but Jadhav expects that figure to increase as more testing proves SAF to be a reliable fuel. “As we test at higher blend ratios, we should be able to use it at higher ratios in the future,” he says, adding that successful tests are being conducted already with SAF at 100%. “So, it’s just a matter of getting the hours into those engine cycles and making sure that there’s no degradation of engine parts or long-term degradation in general. And as that happens more and more, regulatory authorities will get the confidence to start increasing the blend levels.”Jadhav says potential customers regularly ask if the technology is real, and are amazed when they see it in person in Alameda, California. “It is real, and we are progressing—the dream that Nicholas, Etosha and Kendra had back in 2016 is starting to become a reality.”Twelve cofounders Flanders, Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave, and Chief Technology Officer Kendra Kuhl started the company based on the Phd research of Cave and Kuhl at Stanford Business School. The two were both focusing on electrocatalysis for CO2 conversion, while Flanders was working on his joint engineering and business administration masters' degrees. “It certainly struck a chord for me because it was a way of adding value to captured CO2 as opposed to just taking CO2 and pouring it in the ground,” Flanders says. The team needed to take these scientific principles and turn them into an industrially efficient and scalable device that could be used at a significant enough scale to have a real impact on the climate.The technology was incubated at Stanford’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory through a fellowship program now called Activate. All of the funding was government-derived to start, Flanders says, from the Energy Department, NASA and the National Science Foundation. “With some traction and proof of concept demonstration and interest from customers, we were able to attract venture capital.”Then, in 2021, the Air Force expressed interest, not only for sustainability and flexibility, but also as a means to save lives, as fuel transports are often targeted, Flanders says. Twelve started to look toward commercialization and further scale-up, eventually growing to 270 employees. The company is well funded, Jadhav says, and raised over $250 million in the past few years. “The amount of confidence and support we’ve seen from investors and partners has been tremendous. We’ve attracted some of the biggest investors,” he says, citing Microsoft, Capricorn Investment Group, DCVC and Microsoft Climate Investment Fund. Twelve also has a 14-year, multimillion-gallon deal with International Airlines Group, as well as an agreement with the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, a group of corporate customers interested in purchasing SAF credits. “The last few years of commercialization have been tremendous because we wouldn’t have imagined corporate customers pooling together to buy large amounts of SAF credits, for example,” Jadhav says. “Just being part of that process has been tremendous.”Current and Future Development&nbsp; About 50% complete, Twelve's commercial plant in Moses Lake is expected to begin delivering fuel in mid-2025, Jadhav says. Much of the electrolysis equipment is in place and significant milestones on the hydrogen process are expected in the next few months. “It’s progressing as we hoped and we’re lucky to have partners like Alaska Airlines that also are looking forward to the fuel starting next year,” he says.The CO2 supply for the plant will come from undisclosed ethanol producers. “It’s fairly concentrated CO2, it’s fairly clean, which means it’s relatively easy and cheap to capture and process,” Flanders says. “We’re quite compatible with this existing industry that’s making biogenic CO2 emissions, and we can now put them to use and turn them into clean fuel.” Estimating CO2 emissions of about 40 million tons across the U.S. ethanol industry annually, Flanders says, “There’s a huge amount of CO2 that’s just being thrown away every day. We can turn that CO2 into e-jet fuel.”The goal for scale-up is to colocate near ethanol plants for Twelve’s dozen or so future U.S. facilities, Flanders says, before branching out internationally. Siting what Twelve calls AirPlants—producing e-jet fuel and e-naphtha—relies heavily upon demand, electricity costs and policy environments.Washington has demand for SAF, on account of its significant air traffic, Boeing facilities and other industries, Jadhav says. It also has favorable costs for land, CO2 and clean electricity. Twelve is looking to solar, wind and hydro power, with as little fossil content as possible. “Washington has a lot of hydropower and at reasonable cost,” Jadhav says. “That was one of the key, key elements right there because our process uses such a large amount of electricity, and that electricity cost is one of our key drivers to where we locate.”But likely the most important factor in choosing Washington for the first air plant is its policy environment. “Washington has a very visionary perspective on sustainable fuels and renewable diesel and anything climate-oriented, and they’re putting together the right policies,” Jadhav says. “And we ended up signing an agreement with Alaska Airlines and Microsoft, so with the delivery of the fuel going to Seattle, everything became just very cohesive and aligned.”Successful scale-up for the SAF industry will require discipline, Jadhav says. “For the industry to really meet the objectives we’ve set out for 2050, there has to be disciplined growth, from a value-driven perspective, simply because the cost has to be looked at very closely because the product itself—fuel and SAF in general—cannot cost the same in 2050 as it does right now. It’s our responsibility to embark on that cost curve. We could hypothetically build multiple plants at the same time, but that won’t give us the cost synergies that we want. In a very disciplined way, we are focused on building our first commercial plant, learning from that and then building the next one around 2028.” The readily available feedstock and modular design also are favorable for Carbon Transformation Technology to successfully scale.After SAF scale-up, Twelve will continue to explore other options for its technology. “The applicability is quite diverse, but we’ve chosen to be very disciplined and choose one product, prove out the technology and grow the business using that product, and diversify in the future when it makes sense from a business perspective and an industry perspective,” adds Jadhav, who lists sunglass lenses, laundry detergent, plastics for chairs and picture frames among the possibilities. &nbsp;“We want to succeed, and our future vision here is that one day, CO2 will improve its brand image—going from a pollutant to a feedstock that is essential to create not just fuel, but other materials and chemicals.”Author: Lisa Gibson&nbsp; Contributing Writer, SAF Magazine

2024-08-26 - Carbon Rebrand (SAF Magazine)

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California-based Twelve is making SAF with carbon dioxide from industrial processes like ethanol production. Once established, the versatile technology will branch out into other fuels, chemicals and materials, all from CO2. 

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Upcoming Events

North American SAF Conference & Expo

2026 International Biomass Conference & Expo

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