Global Bioenergies and Lanzatech announce new collaboration agreement

Global Bioenergies, a French producer of isobutene, and fermentation technology supplier LanzaTech have made a new collaboration agreement to strengthen their innovations.

Global Bioenergies has developed a process in which a microorganism can produce isobutene from renewable feedstock.

Traditionally, the company's primary focus has been to use industrial-grade or waste-derived sugars as feedstocks. However, its new technology allows the firm to include non-biomass-derived sources of carbon.

LanzaTech's carbon recycling technology enables the bio-based transformation of industrial wastes, such as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, into valuable commodities.

Waste gases from the chemistry of steel making, for example, can be captured and recycled into biofuels or chemicals such as acetone and others.

LanzaTech is currently building its first commercial facilities, which will produce ethanol from waste steel mill gases.

The two companies entered into a collaboration agreement in 2011, with the goal to synergize their technologies, and build microbial strains capable of converting non-sugar feedstock into isobutene.

Based on the results obtained during these four years, the two companies have now entered a new collaboration agreement in order to both intensify this cooperation and to develop, an integrated process.

Marc Delcourt, CEO at Global Bioenergies, said: "The diversification of feedstocks will leverage the technology of Global Bioenergies, and will be an important asset for the massive deployment of our technology on the mid-term."

Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, said: "The expansion of our synthetic biology portfolio has shown gas fermenting microbes to have the same capabilities as sugar fermenting organisms.

"We are now able to produce a variety of chemicals from a broad array of gas feedstocks, driving both economic and environmental benefits."