sustainable-aviation-fuel
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StormFisher Bought a $1.5 Billion Clean-Fuel Headache for $17.5 Million - Now It Has to Make the Math Work
A Canadian project developer picked up a stranded Quebec fuel complex at a steep discount, scrapped its original process and bet on e-methanol. The clever part is reuse; the hard part is turning cheap infrastructure into bankable fuel.
Lewis Dutel Is Taking a Fermentation Shortcut to the Fuel Tank
The Houston engineer spent years solving hard problems underground. At VIA BioFuels, he is betting that one volatile molecule can make renewable fuel simpler to produce and easier for existing infrastructure to use.
The Fuel Startup Betting a Molecule Can Just Float Out of the Tank
Most biofuels get stuck in the same trap: make the alcohol, then spend a fortune pulling it out of the water. A four-person Houston team engineered a yeast whose product simply volatilizes away - and they think that changes the math.
The 133-Year-Old Company That Broke Itself Apart to Chase Jet Engines
General Electric spent a century as America's everything-company. In 2024 it broke itself into three and kept only the part that flies - and Wall Street decided the pieces were worth more than the whole ever was.
Terragia Biofuel
Terragia Biofuel is a New Hampshire climate-tech startup turning non-food plant waste into cost-competitive, low-carbon ethanol using engineered thermophilic bacteria. Its consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) approach skips the expensive enzymes and thermochemical pretreatment that have historically sunk cellulosic biofuel economics, promising an 8x shorter payback period at 10x smaller scale. Spun out of Professor Lee Lynd's decades of research at Dartmouth, Terragia aims to make biofuels for hard-to-electrify transport - aviation, shipping, and long-haul trucking - that can actually compete with fossil fuels.
Nicholas Flanders
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Twelve
Twelve is a carbon transformation company that uses an electrochemical reactor to turn captured CO2, water, and renewable electricity into the same chemicals and fuels usually drilled out of the ground - including E-Jet, a drop-in sustainable aviation fuel. Founded by Stanford-trained electrochemists, it is building the first industrial-scale CO2 electrolyzer plant in Moses Lake, Washington.