In January 2024, the first commercial production facility for converting ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel opened in Soperton, Georgia. Supported by DOE’s Bioenergy Technology Office (BETO), LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuel Facility will produce nine million gallons of SAF and one million gallons of renewable diesel in its first year of operations and will provide significant benefits for the local economy.
February 29, 2024
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Featuring Dr. Mark Shmorhun, Systems Development and Integration, Technology Manager
From Proposal to Reality
In January 2024, the first commercial production facility for converting ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) opened in Soperton, Georgia. Supported by DOE’s Bioenergy Technology Office (BETO), LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuel Facility will produce nine million gallons of SAF and one million gallons of renewable diesel in its first year of operations and will provide significant benefits for the local economy. Dr. Mark Shmorhun, BETO Technology Manager for Systems Development and Integration, is the lead overseeing the project.
“I was part of the group that evaluated proposals and helped select them under the original funding opportunity announcement,” said Dr. Shmorhun. “It’s just super rewarding to see steel and ground, tanks built, fire hydrants flares…you name it. And hopefully they'll have a very smooth start up in the coming weeks and start producing sustainable aviation fuel to help meet one of our goals.”
The opening of the Freedom Pines Fuel facility is a major milestone in meeting the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge, which was launched in 2021 by DOE, by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industry partners, with a goal of producing three billion gallons of SAFs by 2030 and for SAFs to meet 100 percent of U.S. aviation fuel demand by 2050.
Aviation accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 11% of all transportation emissions. The SAF that will be produced at the new facility is just one step in advancing new sustainable fuels projects globally to meet aviation's decarbonization goals. “This is a tiny plant, 10 million gallons for your total production,” said Dr. Shmorhun. “It doesn't move the needle on the demand for SAF, but this is a modular design. If it works here, or if they encounter some challenges and resolve them, it gets built into the evolution of the engineering design and the ability to scale projects like this. The barriers and risks to scaling are just dramatically reduced.”
The Freedom Pines Fuel Facility serves as a blueprint for innovative ways to produce SAF and reduce GHG emissions. “There have been numerous examples of much smaller scale technology demonstrations of alcohol-to-jet, but this is the one where you validate all your engineering assumptions to see if you're meeting key performance targets,” Dr. Shmorhun explains. “That in turn validates your cost of production and your operating cost. It validates the supply chains necessary to bring the raw materials in and get the aviation fuel out. It validates all the economic assumptions made about this process technology, and it will also define with much improved certainty what the cost of these plants will be at much larger scales, which is where we need to go.”
Freedom Pines Fuel Facility: Impacting Local Economies
The LanzaJet facility is expected to provide the local economy of Soperton, Georgia, with dozens of new quality jobs, an estimated $5 million in new annual wages and benefits, and a total economic impact of $70 million annually. According to Dr. Shmorhun, at peak construction, there were 300 people on-site working every day and more than 30 full-time employees have been added on the site just to run the plant. Both Lanzatech and LanzaJet, the subsidiary of LanzaTech, will be in Soperton contributing to SAF production.
The impact of Freedom Pines to the community is momentous. Revitalizing rural communities like Soperton will not only accelerate SAF but provide new economic opportunities. “I'm on a monthly project call with LanzaJet to talk about status and one of the things they lead with is what’s being done with the local fire department,” said Dr. Shmorhun. “We're training them. We're helping to add equipment so they’re in better shape to respond in the very unlikely event that we have an incident on site. All of that is empowering the community by building capability in the volunteer fire department. That’s amazing. The BBQ place in town, which makes really good barbecue, has seen a whole lot of business as well. So local businesses, gas stations, everything benefits from this.”
LanzaJet is recognized as a leading sustainable fuels technology company that uses ethanol-based technology to scale production of SAF to the levels needed to decarbonize through sustainable feedstocks. Dr. Shmorhun shared the importance of ethanol as a plentiful low-cost raw material that can be transformed into aviation fuel. “Globally, we have roughly 30 billion gallons of ethanol production around the world. In the United States it comes from corn in Brazil,” he said. “It comes from sugar cane in India. It comes from a variety of sources. It is a plentiful and good feedstock. It's a good basic chemical for lots of downstream products, but aviation fuel is a really good candidate as an ethanol feedstock.”
Project Management: Systems Development and Integration
Dr. Shmorhun has been with BETO since 2016 and has a background in the specialty chemicals and biochemical industries in research and development (R&D), engineering, and business development roles. He followed the footsteps of his father and received a degree in chemical engineering. Read more about his educational and career background here.
Dr. Shmorhun shared that one of the most rewarding parts of his role at BETO is to review funding opportunity announcements (FOA) and work with different companies and organizations to meet their objectives. “It's a privilege to be able to review applications. These companies and universities work hard to write these FOA applications. It's amazing the breadth of technologies. Technology managers get an inside look at their proposals and what they’re promising to do. The process that we go through to review and select and stand up the projects is super rigorous. Every once in a while, I can offer insights that I hope are valuable. It's super rewarding to see these projects get to the finish line.”
Developing the Next Generation of Efficient and Clean Wood Heaters
Another major project in Dr. Shmorhun’s portfolio impacts rural communities. He’s working with different groups to develop wood stove technologies to make stoves smarter, more efficient, and less polluting. According to Dr. Shmorhun, in New York, Maine, and Vermont, emissions from wood stoves are the leading cause of particulate matter (PM) emissions in the air. Old wood stoves are not designed to efficiently combust wood in a manner that minimizes PM.
“PM is bad for your health. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates wood stoves and over the last decade they have tightened compliance and performance requirements for wood stoves to reduce emissions. But there's still this entire fleet of stoves in the United States, many of which are 20-years-old or even older, that pollute badly.”
In many rural communities, individuals don’t have access to or can afford electricity, propane, or heating oil to run a furnace in their home. “But you have access to plentiful wood so you're going burn wood to heat your house,” said Dr. Shmorhun. “Heat is an essential human need, and you need to stay warm during the winter.” BETO is standing up development projects with several stove manufacturers to help develop smart stoves or redesign stove internals so that they're cleaner burning.
Dr. Shmorhun has decades of experience and extensive education in the science and renewable energy field. He shared more information on LanzaJet, some of his career highlights, and advice to those looking to enter clean energy.
What skillset do you think is required to be successful in clean energy and be involved in a project like LanzaJet?
“It takes a lot of different skill sets. The process design is usually driven by chemical engineers and sometimes mechanical engineers. Before you even design a process, you have scientists in national laboratories that have developed the catalysts and the other technology. The LanzaJet process has been a more than decade-long journey from when the basic bench top experimental work began at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to where we are today. That was driven by chemical engineers, chemists, synthetic organic chemists, physical chemists that are working at the labs. In detailed engineering, you have civil engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers - it takes a lot of knowledge of electrical engineering, instrumentation, and controls."
“It takes individuals who are good with computers. All design today is done on computers in computer-aided design, and everything's done in 3 dimensions including the basic modeling of developing the material and energy balance for the plant. So, it takes keen understanding and the ability to drive the various software platforms that are involved in the design of these plants. And then it takes a lot of experience on the construction side. So, you have specialists in the field who can understand concrete, steel, how to wield pipe, pull cable, and more. You have the manufacturing facilities that are building vessels, valves, and instrumentation. You have all kinds of other project resources. Scheduling is a super important activity when building a plant like this. So, you have individuals who are highly specialized in developing very intricate projects, schedules that are tracking every hour that goes into a project to sequence activities and minimize overall project cost. It takes people with accounting backgrounds, finance backgrounds to do project controls and manage budgets. All of the fields come together. It takes an amazing community to be successful pulling off one of these projects.”
What advice do you have for an individual or college student looking to enter the clean energy field after reading the news about LanzaJet?
“I don't think it matters what degree you get. I've done so many different things and I've never been constrained by the degrees I have. And maybe that's because I have a pile of them and I've just sort of been able to drive into anything I want to do. But that's just me. I've always just moved into something that I wanted to do next. I've never had a plan, a long-term plan. So, in terms of career, I would encourage people to just do what you want to do and what feels good and what makes sense to you."
“For federal employees that are seeking a technology manager role, I think hands on industrial experience in the field would be very beneficial. Getting out there, building, and getting your hands dirty, however you define getting your hands dirty, and understanding the process behind everything that you do is super important. I just think there's going to be massive opportunity everywhere across the board, if we really, truly engage on decarbonizing our day-to-day lives."
“Clean energy is bigger than the Internet, right? It’s bigger than anything we've seen before. If we can wrap our heads around it and really commit to decarbonizing the economy, there’s a huge opportunity everywhere. It’s a bit of a frustration that we're kicking and screaming our way into this.”
What are some of your career highlights while at BETO?
“I'm in my 8th year. I’ve brought projects to close. I think that brings a sense of accomplishment. Writing a FOA, standing up the project, working through the entire project to the final technical report and closing it out. It's been good to see the full cycle. LanzaJet is a prime example of that as an accomplishment. I hope that the three decades of experience I have is helpful in this organization. Also, being part of the SAF Grand Challenge from the start, from the memorandum of understanding, through the crafting of the language is a career highlight.”