| Project Detail |
To accomplish net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 we need to decarbonize industrial manufacturing and food production. Use of fermentation processes to replace carbon intensive traditional ways to produce fuels, materials and food is vital to that task. Examples of bioprocesses that alleviate emissions are bioethanol production and alternative protein production from plant biomass. However, these bioprocesses are not carbon efficient. Current commercial methods to produce ethanol biofuel from sugar or starches waste more than 30% of the carbon in the feedstock as carbon dioxide (CO2) in the fermentation step alone. This waste limits product yields and squanders valuable feedstock carbon as greenhouse gas CO2. Preventing the loss of carbon as CO2 during bioconversion, or directly incorporating external CO2 as a feedstock into bioconversions, would revolutionize bioprocessing by increasing the product yield per unit of carbon input by more than 50%.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
Circe Bioscience is building a carbon-efficient precision fermentation platform to produce energy-rich long-chain carbon chemicals with applications in several industrial sectors including fuels, materials, and food. The Circe system has a high degree of feedstock flexibility allowing it to take advantage of the legacy bioeconomy for cheap sugar supply and of a growing green energy infrastructure for external reducing equivalents to achieve high carbon efficiency. Circe uses proprietary technology to engineer fatty acid metabolism for production of reduced carbon compounds that can be used as fuel precursors, materials or food ingredients. This allows Circe to build a road map for transitioning to a carbon-efficient bioeconomy and increasing sustainability of currently high emitting industrial sectors.
The application of biology to build a carbon-efficient, enhanced bioeconomy by taking advantage of the growing renewable energy infrastructure provides economic, environmental, social, and national security benefits and offers a promising means of carbon management. |
