Just three weeks after announcing its intention at the Paris Air Show, Silicon Valley startup Twelve broke ground Tuesday on the site of a former sugar beet mill in Moses Lake to begin construction of a plant that will produce sustainable aviation fuel.
Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is made from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels. It is a critical focus of the aviation industry in its push to decarbonize, and yet only small amounts of it are produced.
Twelve’s Moses Lake project is the first tangible sign in this state of investment to begin to produce SAF on a bigger, though still modest, scale.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, Gov. Jay Inslee and sustainability leaders from Microsoft and Alaska Air Group hailed the project as a breakthrough for aviation and for the state. Inslee called it “the dawn of new aviation.”
Noting the news of a heat dome in the Southern U.S. and floods in New England, Inslee said the “unprecedented levels of catastrophe in the climate” require an urgent response.
He said Twelve’s “incredibly promising new technologies” offer potential solutions that could offer his grandchildren “a shot at a life that is not destroyed by climate change and still be able to fly.”
Also speaking at the groundbreaking, Ann Ardizzone, vice president of strategic sourcing and supply chain management at Alaska Air, cautioned that there’s “a huge, huge hill to climb to get us where we need to go.”
The airline industry uses about 20 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and last year only about 10 million gallons of SAF was produced, about 0.05% of the total.
“Today I can rarely buy SAF and if I can, it’s incredibly expensive,” Ardizzone said.
Dutch company SkyNRG plans a larger SAF plant for Washington state with a goal to be operational by 2029 and to produce 30 million gallons per year.
Twelve CEO Nicholas Flanders said the initial target for the Moses Lake plant is to produce 40,000 gallons of SAF per year, which is only about three truckloads.
“We’ll expand as much as we can over time,” he said in an interview afterward.
Flanders asked attendees at the groundbreaking to look forward to “when the first Alaska Airlines flights take off powered by E-jet fuel made here at this plant.”
Ardizzone said “the technology that Twelve is going to bring to scale is probably one of the most important levers” to get Alaska Air to its initial target of having 10% of the fuel in its jets be SAF by 2030.
“The technology probably doesn’t even exist today to produce SAF at the scale that we’re going to need,” Ardizzone said, but added that Twelve’s project “is a fantastic first step.”
Fuel from CO2 and water
Twelve, named for the atomic mass of carbon, has developed a process to make jet fuel using renewable electricity, water and waste biomass CO2 instead of fossil fuels.
The electricity is used to split water and CO2 to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are then combined to produce “syngas” — a synthetic hydrocarbon gas that can be processed into jet fuel.
Twelve is partnering with Emerging Fuels Technology, based in Tulsa, Okla., which will license its approved process for turning the syngas into jet fuel.
“It will all be done here,” Flanders said in an interview. “CO2 will go in and jet fuel will come out.”
The project is expected to provide more than 100 construction jobs to build the plant and 20 full-time “green jobs” in Moses Lake to operate it.
Microsoft is an investor in Twelve through its Climate Innovation Fund.
At the groundbreaking, Brandon Middaugh, senior director of the Climate Innovation Fund at Microsoft Sustainability, said that while aviation business travel represents less than 1% of the software maker’s overall carbon emissions, “when you add in consulting services, logistics, and freight aviation, that total reaches about 5%, and it’s one of the most-difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.”
Microsoft is pushing ahead with three options, she said: “We can fly less, we can fly smarter, and we can fly cleaner.”
Flanders said in Paris that Twelve chose Moses Lake in Central Washington because of its access to both green electricity and biomass sources of waste CO2, such as ethanol plants and pulp and paper mills.
Another major factor, he said, was the recent legislation passed in the state to subsidize production of sustainable aviation fuel by up to $2 per gallon on top of the clean energy subsidies embedded in the federal Inflation Reduction Act.
In another effort to boost aviation’s decarbonization effort, Snohomish County and Washington State University have partnered to establish a research and development center for SAF in Everett.
Microsoft’s Middaugh called the state legislation “a major, major step forward,” adding that government policies to subsidize SAF are essential to ramp up production to the necessary scale.
“We’re at an inflection point for this industry,” she said. “These are the early innings of what will be a really transformational industrial change.”
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