American Airlines has expanded its decarbonisation activities, announcing new partnerships with two US-based start-ups – Infinium, an emerging producer of sustainable aviation fuels, and Graphyte, a carbon removal and storage company. Both new businesses are backed by Breakthrough Energy, the climate action investment group established by technology billionaire Bill Gates. American will be Graphyte’s first customer, purchasing 10,000 tons of carbon removal credits from early 2025. Through its Project Roadrunner initiative, Infinium plans commercial-scale production of power-to-liquid fuels, or eFuel, by collecting, combining and converting carbon dioxide and renewably-produced power. American has signed a “definitive” offtake agreement with Infinium, details of which were not disclosed.

Infinium’s Project Roadrunner will convert an existing brownfield gas-to-liquids project in West Texas into what the company claims will become North America’s largest eFuels facility, supplying both the US and international markets. The integrated plant will mainly produce eSAF, an aviation decarbonisation pathway which is projected to reduce lifecycle fuel emissions by about 90%. It will also manufacture eDiesel for use by the road freight and maritime sectors and eNaptha for plastics production. 

The American Airlines’ deal with Infinium, which the companies described as “a critical enabler of further investment in Project Roadrunner,” was announced alongside a $75 million investment in Infinium by Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which supports first-of-a-kind projects that accelerate the use of climate technologies to cut harmful emissions and help to reduce the green premium. The Infinium deal, which is subject to “the satisfaction of certain closing conditions”, was Catalyst’s first equity investment.

American is a foundation partner of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, seeking to help drive the development of new clean energy technologies including SAF. To further support the eSAF offtake deal, American and US-based banking group Citi – also a partner of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst – agreed to transfer the associated emission reductions to the bank to support scaling of Infinium’s eSAF programme, as well as helping to offset Scope 3 emissions of air travel by its employees.

“American joined Breakthrough Energy Catalyst because we saw the potential to accelerate the commercialisation of the clean energy technologies of the future,” said Jill Blickstein, the airline’s Chief Sustainability Officer. “Today we see the realisation of that potential in Catalyst’s investment in Infinium’s electrofuels SAF, coupled with American’s long-term commitment to purchase those fuels. Our partnership with Catalyst, and our new commitment with Infinium, exemplifies the novel collaboration necessary to bring to market the new technologies that will allow us to decarbonise.”

Robert Schuetzle, CEO of Infinium, said the Catalyst investment was critical to accelerating Project Roadrunner and the delivery of significant volumes of eFuels produced by combining CO2 and renewable power. “The groundbreaking commercial agreement with American is an important prototype for the aviation industry as its firm offtake agreement supports project financing, providing revenue certainty for the project,” he said.

Mario Fernandez, Head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, added: “This project is a landmark achievement for the development of sustainable aviation fuels. The offtake agreement provides a model for the entire aviation industry of one way to effect change and support the scale up of capital-intensive projects. Infinium’s technological and commercial maturity, coupled with the company’s project development expertise, will help accelerate the clean energy transition by quickly bringing to market clean fuels for aviation, trucking and other long-distance parts of the transportation sector.”

Val Smith, Citi’s Chief Sustainability Officer, said: “We hope the offtake agreement with American, where we combine their direct use of SAF with our indirect use through our business travel, will serve as one model for how offtake agreements can be used to help scale up future solutions for low-emissions air travel.”

American’s second partnership is with carbon removal company Graphyte, which instead of extracting CO2 directly from the air, plans to transform existing carbon-holding biomass by-products, including crop and forestry waste, which contain CO2 already captured from the air through the natural process of photosynthesis. Through its Carbon Casting process, Graphyte secures the biomass waste, then dries and converts it into solid carbon blocks, which are sealed, stored underground and monitored to ensure no carbon leakage. The company then sells carbon credits as offsets, with American Airlines to be its first customer, purchasing 10,000 tons of permanent carbon removal from early 2025.

Backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Graphyte says its process is far less expensive than other carbon capture systems, which rely on large fans to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. Instead, says the company, “we returned to nature’s proven, efficient process for capturing carbon from the atmosphere – photosynthesis.”

The company dries the biomass, eliminating microbes and water which cause decomposition and enable captured carbon to escape. Carbon blocks are then created, sealed and permanently stored. The first commercial scale use of the technology will be at the company’s facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, though timing was not revealed.

“Carbon Casting lets nature efficiently do the work of capturing the CO2, then leverages engineering techniques to store it permanently,” explained Graphyte’s Founder and CEO Barclay Rogers. “This is a landmark agreement for both Graphyte and American Airlines. It demonstrates the growing demand for affordable and scalable high-quality carbon removal credits and the ability of Carbon Casting technology to make a significant impact in the fight against climate change in the very near term.”

The partnership fits American’s strategy of diversifying decarbonisation technologies to maximise its carbon emission reductions.

“American is focused on accelerating new, low-carbon technologies to reduce aviation’s climate impact,” explained Blickstein. “Hard-to-abate industries like aviation will need high-quality, permanent, affordable and scalable carbon credits, including removals, to achieve our emissions reduction goals. We are excited to work with Graphyte to help them scale their important new technology.” 

Photo: American Airlines

Tony Harrington

Correspondent

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Breakthrough Energy, a specialist vehicle created by technology billionaire Bill Gates to expedite the transition to clean energy, has awarded $50 million to US-based renewable fuels company LanzaJet, which plans to produce the world’s first alcohol-to-jet sustainable aviation fuel from next year at its Freedom Pines Fuels plant in Soperton, Georgia. The grant is the first provided through the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst programme, which unites corporate and philanthropic groups to help fund new commercial-scale decarbonisation projects. Once it is fully operational, Freedom Pines is expected to deliver 9 million gallons of SAF and 1 million gallons of renewable diesel fuel per year. LanzaJet is also planning to develop other major SAF production plants in North America, Europe and Asia, which it says will eventually have a combined capacity to produce more than 1 billion gallons of SAF per year.

The Catalyst programme initially is focused on four technology pillars – SAF, long-duration energy storage, green hydrogen and direct air capture. Rodi Guidero, Executive Director of Breakthrough Energy, and Managing Partner of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said LanzaJet’s new SAF plant could be a key contributor to lower-emission air transport, while also demonstrating how jobs and businesses of the clean energy sector could support communities. “Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is a new way for the private sector to accelerate the green energy transition by funding projects that will ensure essential climate solutions get to market on the timeline the world needs,” he stated.

Breakthrough said ground-breaking projects for emerging technologies often encountered difficulty accessing low-cost capital because they had “high green premiums” and faced unexpected challenges and costs, particularly in the current high inflation environment. “By providing capital to these types of early commercial facilities, Catalyst funding can reduce risk for follow-on investments and accelerate the deployment of clean technologies,” the company said. “In this case, Freedom Pines Fuels’ Catalyst grant filled a funding gap and will enable the plant to maintain its current development timeline.

“Importantly, the grant will also spur further SAF innovation by helping create a new market for scaleable, low-carbon ethanol from sustainable sources by setting the expectation that the plant will transition to second-generation ethanol, including from waste-based feedstocks, by its fifth year. This transition will complement work LanzaJet is already doing to build SAF plants using second-generation ethanol in the UK, and develop strategic partnerships to accelerate the advanced fuel’s development, of which there is currently little supply in the market.”   

Guidero added: “We’re grateful to Catalyst’s partners, who understand climate leadership means supporting the technologies that will eliminate emissions, and that solving our climate challenges will require nothing less than mobilising the world’s economic engine to build a net-zero future.”

Welcoming the grant, LanzaJet CEO Jimmy Samartzis said: “To maximise our impact and scale our technology to deliver significant quantities of sustainable aviation fuel worldwide, partnerships matter. We have a real opportunity on our doorstep to significantly scale up and globally deploy our technology, and we wouldn’t be able to build this plant as quickly or affordably without Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst grant, which reduced our total cost of capital and is critical to reducing emissions and accelerating the pace of bringing SAF to the global market.”

LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels facility has already attracted funding from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and the US Department of Energy, in addition to investments from shareholders including Mitsui & Co, Suncor Energy, LanzaTech, British Airways and Shell. The grant from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst also coincides with US government initiatives to expedite the production of SAF, including tax credits to kickstart production as part of the newly-introduced Inflation Reduction Act, which additionally features a $297 million grant programme designed to scale up clean aviation technologies, including SAF.

The US initiatives also form part of its newly-released ‘Flight Plan for Sustainable Aviation Fuel’, which sets ambitious production targets of 3 billion gallons per year by 2030, and 35 billion gallons per year by 2050, compared to just 5 million gallons last year. The US report also highlights a requirement for more than 400 biorefineries and 1 billion tons of biomass or gaseous carbon dioxide feedstock in order to meet steep decarbonisation estimates for 2050.  “This makes widescale production and use of SAF the highest impact near-term strategy for significantly reducing aviation emissions and achieving the nation’s net zero emission goals for aviation by 2050,” it concluded.  

Photo: LanzaJet

American Airlines has become an anchor partner in Bill Gates’ new Breakthrough Energy Catalyst and committed an investment of $100 million in the programme to support the advancement and funding of sustainable aviation fuels and other emissions reduction technologies such as green hydrogen, direct air capture and long-duration energy storage. According to Gates, Catalyst will focus on supporting technologies that are vital to reaching global net zero emissions but are currently too expensive to be adopted at scale. “By coordinating investments and directing them towards these critical technologies, we can reduce their ‘green premiums’ and help them get to market faster, so we can all reach our climate goals,” he said. American joins six other anchor partners as the first group of private sector organisations in the programme: ArcelorMittal, Bank of America, The BlackRock Foundation, Boston Consulting Group, General Motors and Microsoft. Introduced earlier this year, Catalyst is part of the larger Breakthrough Energy network founded by Gates. This includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is focused on investing in entrepreneurial companies with clean energy solutions and has investments in aviation start-ups Heart Aerospace and ZeroAvia.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is described as a first-of-its-kind model bringing together companies, governments and private philanthropy to accelerate the adoption of critical, next generation clean technologies. The partners pledge to work together to finance, produce and buy new technology solutions that are currently more expensive than their existing fossil-fuel emitting counterparts.

“We see immense promise in the mission of Catalyst and our investment is a vote of confidence in the difference-making potential of this unique and collaborative approach,” said American CEO Doug Parker. “We have an ambitious vision of a low-carbon future for our airline and a plan to match, but we know our own efforts can only get us so far. By working in partnership with Catalyst, we’re helping accelerate and scale our industry’s nascent solutions, like sustainable aviation fuel, along with other technologies that will be necessary to reduce emissions from aviation and across the economy.”

American Airlines has a net zero by 2050 goal, along with a commitment to set a science-based 2035 intermediate target, which relies in large part on using increasing volumes of SAF. It has been taking delivery of SAF from Neste for over a year and has agreed to using 9 million gallons in total through until 2023, along with a further agreement to purchase up to 10 million gallons of carbon-neutral e-fuels produced by Prometheus Fuels. The airline says its partnership with Catalyst will augment the ongoing efforts to advance SAF and bring the market to scale.

The path to net zero also hinges on maximising the efficiency of its aircraft and operation, it adds, and has invested $24 billion in fleet modernisation with 600 new, more fuel-efficient aircraft while retiring a similar number of less-efficient planes.

“Because reducing the impact of air travel on the planet is inextricably linked with the actions of many other entities, fostering impactful collaboration – within the industry, across the private sector and with policymakers – is fundamental to American’s sustainability strategy,” said the airline. “Our anchor partnership with Catalyst exemplifies the type of cooperation necessary to decarbonise the industry and forestall the most serious effects of climate change.”

Since it was launched, Catalyst has already announced large-scale partnerships with the European Commission, the European Investment Bank and the US Department of Energy. The seven new partners are expected to make significant investments in early commercial demonstration projects, offer perspectives on continued private sector engagement, provide insights on investments and offtake strategies, and help to encourage more companies to join the programme. Additional anchor partners may be announced in the lead-up to the COP26 climate change conference, it said.

“By working with this growing community of private and public partners, Catalyst will take a global view of the energy innovation landscape – the key technologies, leading-edge companies, financing partners and pivotal policies – and fund the projects that will have the greatest positive impact for our planet,” said Gates.

“American Airlines has demonstrated both ambition and action when it comes to combating climate change, and we applaud the leadership role they’re taking in joining Catalyst as an anchor partner.”

Photo: American Airlines