[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Phase Biolabs (YC W22) - Converting CO2 t...
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Launch HN: Phase Biolabs (YC W22) - Converting CO2 to Carbon-
Neutral Chemicals
Hi HN, I am David Ortega, a bioengineer and founder at Phase
Biolabs (https://www.phasebiolabs.com). We're building technology
that uses fermentation to turn CO2 emissions into carbon-neutral
chemicals--specifically into sustainable, cost-competitive solvents
for the pharma, cosmetics, and paint industries. We've built a
lab-scale prototype that is a 1.5L bioreactor with a microorganism
inside that 'eats' carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, converting them
into chemicals as it grows. Here's a demo video I just made for HN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIT3RUeUPE. We are currently
making ethanol in the lab but unfortunately CO2-based ethanol
cannot be legally sold as a beverage, so industrial solvents it is
:) You can do two things with carbon: you can capture it, or you
can use it. Both are hard, but the latter is harder, mainly because
carbon dioxide is so small. Capturing CO2 is usually done by
attaching it to something else, usually another molecule, which is
how we can extract it from a dilute gas stream or 'pull it' out of
the air. But the CO2 molecule is only temporarily transformed.
Using CO2 is a different ball game, usually referred to as CCU
(carbon capture and utilization). For this you need to permanently
convert the molecular structure itself, and since you are working
with extremely tiny pieces of matter, you need extremely precise
machinery. The challenge with converting CO2 is doing it
efficiently. It needs to happen with as little energy as possible
and to be as precise as possible. If you want to convert CO2 into
X, but you also produce Y, and Z, that is a problem which will show
up in the cost. Our solution is bio-based CCU, but there are also
electrochemical and thermochemical technologies, each with
advantages and disadvantages. And there are other bio-based
approaches, such as making trees more efficient (e.g. Living Carbon
W20). All are valid strategies. In biology, CCU is known as carbon
fixation. During my PhD I was engineering microbes to convert
wastes into renewable chemicals and fuels, so I began to study
biochemical carbon pathways, which led me to carbon fixation. I
began to realize how important carbon fixation is at a macro level
(carbon cycle) and how the process works, but also that it is
extremely inefficient and can be optimized. For example, the trees
in your garden don't grow very fast. This is due to photosynthesis
being 2-4% efficient. I've always wanted to start a startup and
that has always been in the back of my mind, so I did things that I
enjoyed that could also help towards reaching that goal, which led
me to this. Advances in synthetic biology mean we can do things
that weren't possible 20-30 years ago. The amount of tinkering that
we can do has substantially increased (and costs have dropped), and
our understanding has grown due to a rise in data and analytics. We
can borrow strategies that have worked in the past in other fields
and apply them in new ways. Since biological carbon fixation is
precise, but very inefficient, our approach is to take that
precision and enhance it using synthetic biology into a process
that is efficient, scalable, and productive enough for industrial
application. We're using microorganisms that can naturally fix
carbon, and transforming them into mini factories. Our
microorganisms are 7x more energy efficient than naturally
occurring plants or algae and in theory can produce almost any
molecule found in nature directly from CO2. Carbon fixation is
catalysed by a carbon fixation (biochemical) pathway, which is
simply a set of enzymes that catalyse a sequence of
steps/reactions. The enzymes attach electrons and hydrogen ions
onto the CO2 molecule, while removing the oxygen, one step at a
time. This process can be called reverse combustion, but whereas
combustion is uncontrolled and explosive (literally), carbon
fixation is highly controlled. It's a stepwise progression from a
single CO2 molecule, adding hydrogen/electrons one at a time and
eventually carbon (going from 1C -> 2C, then 3C etc.) to get to
your target product. Enzymes are the perfect molecular machines for
this as precision is their speciality. Our plan is to initially
sell our technology to CO2 emitters so that they can reduce
emissions and make money by converting a problem/cost (emissions)
into new revenue. The technology scales to the size of the emitter.
The cost is very different for a company that emits 50,000 tons per
year vs 500,000 tons per year. We have some early estimates based
on some economic modelling we've done. We are at an early stage
and have a long way to go but we have big ambitions for using CCU
technology to decarbonise heavy industry, make sustainable
chemicals and transition towards a circular economy. Fermentation
processes are well understood, easily scalable and easy to operate.
We think gas fermentation can be easily deployed around the world
to convert/recycle CO2 into sustainable products and Phase is
aiming to use it to recycle emissions on the gigaton scale by 2040.
I hope this short summary provides new or renewed interest in the
age-old process of fermentation, something that has been with us
for millennia (my family has been making homemade wine for many
years). I'd love to discuss any of these topics with you!
Author : DavidPBL
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-03-04 17:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
| alexose wrote:
| This is fantastic! I'd never considered this pathway for CCUS,
| but it sounds promising. Biology has evolved some pretty
| interesting solutions for low-energy CO2 utilization :)
|
| I have tons of questions, but my first is: How do you measure the
| products that come out of your bioreactor?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| We take a small sample out the bioreactor (1-2 milliliters) and
| run it through HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography). This
| is manual and labour intensive. There are newer techniques like
| raman spectroscopy which measure products in real time.
| rathi2601 wrote:
| Amazing! All power to you David, this is much needed.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you! Long journey ahead but I hope we can rise to the
| challenge.
| danbruc wrote:
| I have two questions.
|
| 1. How efficient is this process, i.e. how much ethanol does your
| lab setup produce per litre of reactor volume and hour?
|
| 2. Is the need of hydrogen a problem, i.e. is the required amount
| of hydrogen for real world usage at scale easily available or
| would this require significant additional hydrogen production
| capacity?
|
| EDIT: Number two has mostly been answered in another comment.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Process efficiency can be measured in different ways. I can't
| give you a number on energy efficiency yet but what I can say
| is that the carbon efficiency of the process can get close to
| 100% yield. We aren't there yet for a number of reasons, but to
| provide details, two things it is related to are mass transfer
| (how much of the gas is dissolved into the water) and the
| residence time (how long the gases are in the bioreactor). With
| our current setup, neither of these has been optimised so the
| yield isn't great. But this is part of developing the process.
| We will soon be switching to better bioreactor designs to
| improve on these fronts.
|
| Your other comment relates to productivity and can be expressed
| as space time yield (STY). Like the above we need to improve on
| this and is part of our next steps.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "unfortunately CO2-based ethanol cannot be legally sold as a
| beverage"
|
| Why not?
|
| Edit: A little searching here seems to say that synthetic ethanol
| can be used as a food ingredient and must be accurately labeled.
| The policy doesn't say that it can't be used in beverages.
| However, I assume that it's use in many beverages are defacto
| banned as synthetic alcohol is not part of the tradition grain
| bill. I don't see why it can't be used in the liquors or a new
| type of beverage.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
|
| Another edit: it appears that FDA lists ethanol as GRAS for
| general food product use, and that TTB approves the use of GRAS
| ingredients. If you use synthetic flavors, it looks like that
| affects the labeling. I assume you would just have to label the
| alcohol consistent with it's source.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Current regulations (in Europe, and I believe the US is the
| same) is that only ethanol produced using yeast-based
| fermentation of crops can be sold for human consumption.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I edited my comment after doing a search. FDA does permit
| synthetic alcohol in food and food chemical production. It
| doesn't say that it can't be part of a beverage, which is
| food. Although there could be other regulations that
| supercede this.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Very interesting! I did not know that, thank you for
| sharing.
|
| This explains how Air Company is selling their ethanol as
| vodka.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Very interested, I didn't know there was a real world
| example.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Remember: Zymergen has the bulk of patents here, a ridiculous
| amount of know-how, and actual factory-level scaling beyond 1.5
| liter bioreactors -- but they're now worth less than pennies on
| the dollar of their initial investment.
|
| Business issues aside, micro-organisms always produce a lot more
| stuff than what you want, and they behave differently depending
| on the micro-environment, and of course they mutate...
|
| It's kind of hard to go up against DARPA projects and national
| labs that have been doing this for decades.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Absolutely it is hard! No denying that.
|
| This is one of the challenges we face against companies that
| are spinning out research that has been publicly funded for
| many years or on a more personal note, going up against people
| who came from more prestigious institutions. But we think we
| have identified a niche that is worth pursuing.
|
| I think Zymergen is an interesting case study and serves as an
| example to companies developing 'new products'. Like most
| things there is no perfect solution. New products open new
| markets, new opportunities, and may seem less risky at the
| beginning, but what happened to Zymergen is an example of what
| can happen when rolling out new products (in this space of
| course). Drop in replacements for example don't face those same
| risks, but they have other challenges of course.
| tito wrote:
| Congrats! Be sure to check out AirMiners Slack where there are
| dozens of other startups working on building new carbon solutions
| for a new industry and eventually a new economy. Some of your YC
| batchmates are members ;)
|
| https://airminers.org/
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you very much for the suggestion!
| boringg wrote:
| Interesting concept -- whats the stoichiometric ratio of CO2:H2
| for the reaction and energy balance?
|
| I imagine you would have to be source pure inexpensive green
| hydrogen in order for the CO2 balance to be net negative/neutral
| if that is a goal.
|
| Best of luck - always glad to hear about novel
| approaches/companies.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| The stoichiometric equation is:
|
| 2CO2 + 6H2 > C2H5OH (ethanol) + 3 H2O [[?]G -107.4 +/- 36.8
| kJ/mol]
|
| You're absolutely right, we require low cost green hydrogen
| (electricity). The carbon balance depends a bit on what kind of
| carbon you use.
| boringg wrote:
| Thanks - yup sourcing the hydrogen will probably be tricky
| for the next couple years but Im guessing it will take a bit
| of time for you guys to scale up so hopefully you grow at the
| same speed of the green hydrogen market.
|
| Is the core innovation for your company around the bioreactor
| structure or the chemistry? I.e. are there other chemical
| reactions that you are looking at building on?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| I am cheering for the hydrogen companies, we need them!
|
| Core of the innovation is around the engineering of the
| microorganism. One way to think of it is that it is similar
| to chip designs. In the 80s (I think) ARM designed chips
| that had super low power consumption. They patented that
| design and those chip designs are why we enjoy better
| battery life on our devices today. We have a similar
| approach in terms of where our IP resides.
|
| In terms of chemical reactions, we can in theory produce
| almost any chemical compound found in nature directly, and
| all chemicals in multiple steps. Our process is anaerobic
| so we can't do reactions (yet) that require an oxidation
| step. For context, there are more than 200,000 organic
| compounds found in the biosphere.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! When talking about pH control in your
| demo video, a thought occurred to me; what are the chemical
| processes you'd need to scale this technology towards making a
| global impact,and what are their bottlenecks? For example,
| there's been lots of coverage on Lithium supply being a
| significant issue as more countries move to mandate electric
| vehicles. What's the Lithium of your process/industry, if any?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| We are going to need low cost green hydrogen. Existing
| electrolyser technology uses precious metals and so they are
| expensive/current limiting factor. However there are lots of
| startups working on bringing to market electrolysers that use
| non precious metals.
|
| In terms of chemical processes, fermentation is quite simple.
| In addition to the bioreactor you need a device to control the
| gas inputs and you need some downstream processing (product
| extraction). For ethanol distillation is most commonly used but
| there are newer lower energetically demanding techniques that
| can be used for extraction. Not all products can be distilled
| out though, so extraction is somewhat product dependent.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| What is your read on how quickly electrolyser companies will
| be able to scale? Historically they were only used
| industrially in very niche applications (submarines, some
| space applications), so their production was in the ~MW order
| of magnitude. Going towards GW and TW scale is difficult when
| you were previously operating on bigger budget, longer lead
| projects. Do you have any particular companies you're keeping
| an eye on?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| I am optimistic that with the interest, government policy
| and both public and private funding, we can achieve the
| necessary scale required. It will probably take longer than
| the optimists predict and less time than the pessimists
| think.
|
| edit: some interesting hydrogen companies
|
| https://www.sunhydrogen.com/technology (like a solar panel
| but for hydrogen, uses light energy to split water into H2
| + O2)
|
| https://www.alchemr.com/technology/ (electrolysers that use
| non precious metals)
|
| https://www.h2pro.co/technology (membrane free
| electrolysers)
|
| There are also several companies developing 'turquoise'
| hydrogen, which is a plasma based technology. I have no
| connection to this website, but the first few paragraphs it
| lists a few companies in this space:
| https://www.h2-view.com/story/four-more-technologies-for-
| tur...
| idealmedtech wrote:
| Great, thanks and best of luck to you!
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you!
| thinkcontext wrote:
| LanzaTech, a competitor in this space, just made a big
| announcement that they've had excellent results with a scaled up
| bioreactor that "eats" co2 and makes acetone or isopropanol. They
| claim a 120L bioreactor (compared to the 1.5L mentioned here) and
| high yield, both of which they say is an indication they are
| ready for large scale.
|
| https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/reprogrammed-bacterium-t...
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Lanzatech are an amazing company. They are
| pioneers/trailblazers in the field and I have a lot of respect
| for them. They have demonstrated that they gas fermentation
| works at scale. There are advantages and disadvantages to their
| approach, like all technologies / solutions.
| rauhallinen wrote:
| Fascinating indeed - good luck!
|
| Saw some talks years ago by Daniel Nocera, in which they did
| water splitting and fed hydrogen to engineered bacteria to make
| more complex products. Cool stuff - I'd imagine the end products,
| fuels in their case, would still be way too expensive.
|
| There's interesting stuff going on in modifying microbes to make
| cannabinoids and other natural products. Would be kinda cool to
| combine these two :)
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I agree, Daniel Nocera's team have done some really cool
| research and you're right that renewable fuels in general would
| be too expensive. I would argue that the cost of fossil fuels
| are artificially low because their current cost doesn't account
| for the environmental damage they cause. If we had to pay their
| true cost, the difference might not be so great.
|
| I like to dream and so our long term ambition is to try and
| make complex molcules like cannabinoids directly from CO2, but
| we're some ways off.
| tigroferoce wrote:
| So much this! We are seeing artificially low costs because
| the hidden costs (environmental and health) are split onto
| the rest of the society.
|
| We need to campaign to make these costs clear and keep
| companies accountable
| DavidPBL wrote:
| 100% agree. I think carbon taxes are really important here.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Are you picturing some scenario like: a natural-gas fired turbine
| plant captures CO2 with an amine stripper, that CO2 is then fed
| into a bioreactor to produce, say, Ethanol?
|
| It seems to me that the energy content of the Ethanol isn't too
| different from the natural gas going into the plant so I don't
| see how you get ahead doing this... If you've got to add extra
| energy or divert some of the input energy to make hydrogen to
| fuel the reactor how do you end up ahead?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| There are a couple of things at play here.
|
| So first, if you need to do 'work', then definitely just use
| electricity directly to do the job, which is much more
| efficient.
|
| I agree it wouldnt make sense to split natural gas (into CO2 +
| H2) and then recombine it back into ethanol, although oil
| companies would love to do this as they have billions in
| stranded assets in the form of natural gas.
|
| Ideally you couple some process that generates CO2 (not from
| burning fossil fuels) with renewable electricity to recycle
| that carbon back into useful chemicals to displace petroleum
| derived chemicals. Two examples of this would be cement
| manufacture and industrial brewing. But yes you need an
| external energy input, like with most things.
|
| As a side note, the impact of this depends on where you get
| your energy (renewable of course) and your carbon. Some
| companies have caught onto this. For example Unilever created a
| carbon 'rainbow' to separate the types of carbon. Recycling
| renewable carbon is the goal here.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| How do you see the scaling up to multiple gigatonnes per
| year?
|
| For me that has alwayd been the hard part to understand about
| CCU, where is there a market large enough to absorb that
| volume? And where the product does not get burnt or emitted
| anyway in the end?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is a huge amount of talk about things like this or
| CarbFix which all seem secondary to the "capture CO2 at
| some generic capture point and pump it into a saline
| aquifer" approach which seems to be pretty scalable.
|
| Even though the technology is on the shelf it's not being
| deployed largely because there is no financial incentive to
| do so... Yet the widespread use of this technology really
| needs to be happening now if we want any of these carbon
| capture things to happen.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > So first, if you need to do 'work', then definitely just
| use electricity directly to do the job, which is much more
| efficient.
|
| Pardon me but this doesn't sound right. If you want to
| generate heat, burning natural gas is going to be a lot more
| efficient overall than first burning natural gas at a power
| plant then transmitting electricity to your facility to
| convert it to heat. Similarly with rotational energy, etc.
| Your second point stands: if you power your process by solar,
| wind, or hydro you could get ahead of CO2.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| I may have misused the term 'work' here. I was trying to
| describe the displacement of an object through the actions
| of something like a motor. You can achieve that by burning
| fuels (combustion engine), or steam, or an electric motor.
| I was trying to allude to the latter being the most
| efficient.
| solresol wrote:
| Can you output methanol? Maersk is commissioning some new ships
| that are methanol powered; if they succeed their requirements
| alone will probably exceed current worldwide methanol production
| 10x.
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Short answer is no. The real value in our solution is going
| from C1 compounds like CO2 to C2 or C3 or longer chain
| compounds. This is the real difficulty. Methanol is still a C1
| compound. Biology could do it, but it's not what it excels at.
|
| Maersk has commissioned 8 ships to run on methanol. For
| context, Maersk owns 550 ships. Gives you an idea of the size
| of the transportation fuel problem.
| tombert wrote:
| I know basically nothing about biology/fermentation, but from the
| tiny bit I do know by having made yogurt and alcohol, and out of
| curiosity: does this use bacteria, yeast, or some other beast
| that I don't know about?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| We use an autotrophic microorganism called an acetogen.
| Autotrophic means it can use inorganic carbon to feed itself.
| Plants are another example of an autotroph. Humans are
| heterotrophs, meaning we depend on other sources for food.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Do these organisms live in an solution of water an ethanol?
| What is peak ethanol concentration before they start dying?
|
| Is there a possible future where these critters could
| eventually turn a clean CO2 source into recreationally
| drinkable fluid?
| [deleted]
| tombert wrote:
| Really cool stuff...I wish you all the best!
| DavidPBL wrote:
| Thank you!
| tptacek wrote:
| Neat!
|
| Because you're here, and partly out of vicarious self-interest
| (my kid is about to graduate with a biochem bachelors and is
| looking around at industry work before heading back to grad
| school):
|
| What's the day-to-day work here look like? I have a good idea of
| what most software companies, and even a lot of hardware
| companies, do. I have no notion of what line engineers and tech
| workers at a company like this are doing. Is it mostly modeling
| work? Materials engineering stuff? What's the software stack
| here, if any?
| DavidPBL wrote:
| The day to day in lab really depends on the type of lab you are
| working in.
|
| If you are working in analytics, running assays (tests) on
| things like blood or urine samples (hospitals or clinical
| trials) or a more recent example would be a covid clinic, the
| day can be very monotonous. There is a lot of paperwork
| involved due to the regulations you need to adhere to (GMP,
| GCP, GLP). This is one of the reasons I didn't like working in
| pharma. It's better now to things becoming digital, but the
| point is the work can be very repetitive.
|
| If you are working in an R&D lab things are more dynamic. You
| might be running similar experiments from one day to the next,
| but the context is always different. Even though you hit a
| roadblock and get stuck for a day, a week or a month, as things
| progress the type of work will change as the project
| evolves/progresses.
|
| You can work in industry in either of the above environments,
| both provide valuable experience. Industry is stricter and more
| rigid than academic labs.
|
| Day to day it's still very hands on. Things are progressing
| such that you spend less and less time in the lab as things
| become automated and the workflow becomes digitised, but you
| still need to go into the lab even if it is to setup the robot.
| We don't yet have robots to control the robots, although maybe
| sooner than we think. At high level, most R&D lab employ some
| sort of design, build, test, learn (DBTL) workflow, even if
| they don't call it that. Depending on what the focus is, each
| step in that cycle will be slightly different.
|
| The amount of software is growing every day for all
| applications. You have everything from basic software like Lab
| Information Management Systems (LIMS) to help with basic ops to
| more complex software to help plan workflows and analyse data
| (Synthace) to much more specific software like protein
| modelling (Rosetta) or genetic manipulation (Geneious) and the
| list goes on. I am barely scratching the surface here. I regret
| not having more training in python.
|
| edit: not a perfect article, but to give you more of a flavor
| for software in synbio/biotech, check this out:
| https://www.builtwithbiology.com/read/the-synbio-stack-part-...
| tptacek wrote:
| This is the industry at large (and thank you so much for
| that!) but I'm actually really curious about what the work at
| Phase looks like in particular; I assume it's mostly not
| running assays on urine samples. :)
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