Nicholas
Flanders

The man who turned a postage stamp into a pipeline

The first prototype fit in the palm of your hand. A catalyst the size of a Post-it note, stacked in layers, pulling CO2 out of the air and pushing it through an electrochemical reaction to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen - the building blocks of almost everything petroleum is used for today. The lab called it a proof of concept. Nicholas Flanders called it a company.

That company is Twelve - formerly Opus 12, renamed for carbon's atomic weight on the periodic table. It is a quiet statement: carbon is not the villain. Carbon is the point. The atom that built the fossil fuel economy is the same atom Flanders wants to use to replace it.

In September 2024, Twelve announced $645 million in financing - a $200 million Series C and $400 million in project equity led by TPG Rise Climate. The round is one of the largest in e-fuels history. The money is going into AirPlant One, a commercial-scale facility in Moses Lake, Washington that will convert CO2 and water into sustainable aviation fuel using renewable electricity. When it reaches full capacity, it will produce roughly one million gallons of E-Jet SAF per year.

The same month, International Airlines Group - which operates British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, and Vueling - signed a 14-year supply agreement for 785,000 tonnes of that fuel. A decade after the postage stamp, Flanders has an airline customer with a contract that outlasts most marriages.

The path from concept to construction loan was not a straight line. Flanders grew up on a farm in upstate New York - the son of parents who had immigrated from Iran - with a landscape-level instinct for natural systems and a science fiction reader's appetite for industrial-scale solutions. He left for Cornell, triple-majored in mathematics, economics, and international relations, then spent four years as a McKinsey consultant in the cleantech practice, working across seven countries including Syria, Ethiopia, and the Dominican Republic. He arrived at Stanford for an MBA in 2013 with the specific intention of pivoting into climate. He found more than a pivot. He found a lab.

The Stanford Jaramillo Group was already world-leading in CO2 electrocatalysis. Two of its doctoral researchers - Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl - had been quietly building toward what would become Twelve's core technology. Flanders met them not in a lecture hall, but in a student space club. The company that would eventually close the largest e-fuels financing round in US history started over a shared interest in propulsion systems.

Flanders brought business architecture to the scientific breakthrough. In 2015, the three co-founders joined the first cohort of the Cyclotron Road Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - a two-year program for scientists trying to commercialize hard technology. While the scientists went deeper on the chemistry, Flanders built the company around it. That instinct - treating the founders' scientific credibility as a resource to be deployed, not showcased - runs through everything Twelve has done since.

Twelve's technology works by passing CO2, water, and electricity through a reactor about the size of a suitcase. The electrochemical process splits those inputs into carbon monoxide and hydrogen - a mixture called syngas. From syngas, you can make almost any hydrocarbon compound that currently requires petroleum. Jet fuel. Polycarbonate for car parts and eyewear. Ingredients for laundry detergent. The same chemistry, starting from a different place.

The company calls it "A World Made from Air." The technology is essentially a machine that does what plants do with sunlight - using energy to build complex molecules from CO2 - but at industrial scale and at a speed that agriculture cannot match. Flanders describes it as a solar panel you can use for chemistry instead of electricity.

The practical implications are already showing up in products consumers use daily. Twelve's CO2Made polycarbonate went into the C-pillar of a Mercedes-Benz - the first time any car had used material made from CO2 electrolysis as a structural component. Procter & Gamble reformulated Tide detergent with CO2-derived ingredients. Pangaia incorporated CO2Made polycarbonate into eyewear. These are not experiments. They are products on shelves and roads.

Aviation is the harder problem - and Flanders has consistently focused there. Jet fuel is almost impossible to replace with batteries. The energy density required for long-haul flights means liquid hydrocarbons will be necessary for decades. E-Jet SAF - Twelve's synthetic aviation fuel - delivers lifecycle emissions 90% lower than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. It is a "drop-in" fuel, meaning it can be blended and used without modifying existing engines or aircraft. No new hardware. No infrastructure overhaul. Just different chemistry at the refinery end of the supply chain.

The International Airlines Group deal is the clearest signal yet that airlines are not waiting for regulation to force the transition. A 14-year commitment for 785,000 tonnes is a statement about where IAG expects fuel markets to go - and a bet that Twelve will be there to supply them.

Moses Lake, Washington was chosen for AirPlant One because of its access to abundant, low-cost hydroelectric power from the Columbia River basin. Renewable electricity is the key input cost in the AirPlant process, so geography matters more than it does for conventional chemical plants. The facility represents the first construction loan ever issued for an e-fuel plant in the United States - a financing milestone as significant as the technical one.

Flanders is precise about what Twelve is and is not. The company does not capture CO2. It converts it. Partners upstream - industrial emitters, direct air capture companies - supply the CO2 feedstock. Partners downstream - airlines, automakers, consumer goods companies - buy the products. Twelve occupies the middle: the reactor, the chemistry, the transformation. It is a deliberately narrow position in a very long chain, held with unusual conviction.