Guest columnist Keith Peterson: Sustainable energy is a key to the future - and suburbs play an important role
About 15 years ago, I was working at the State Department's Foreign Press Center with a responsibility for Washington-based journalists from Western Europe, and I organized a reporting tour on the subject of alternative energy.
One stop was Chicago, primarily to go to Argonne National Labs in Batavia to talk about the evolution of battery technology, but the stop that really grabbed the journalists' attention was a small startup in Roselle called LanzaTech.
LT had figured out how to work with naturally occurring bacteria that essentially "eats" carbon and produces ethanol. It took a great deal of cajoling to pry the captivated journalists - who wanted to ask more questions - away from LT to stay on our schedule.
It was the kind of story an American government press officer wanted to see in the European press - equating America with a clever and cutting edge technology that might help save the planet.
Today, LanzaTech, now in Skokie, has expanded its work to include the capture and transformation of carbon emissions and is working globally with companies and governments from Western Europe to China. The next dress from Zara or the next yoga pants from lululemon you buy might be made from chemicals produced by LT.
It has also spun off a separate company - LanzaJet in Deerfield - that will make sustainable aviation fuel with emissions 70 percent lower than regular aviation fuel, and LanzaJet has, in turn, recently signed an agreement with Marquis Sustainable Aviation Fuel in Hennepin, Illinois, to produce up to 125 million gallons of fuel by 2025.
Why are technologies like these important? We have seen the profits from Russian oil and gas turned into bombs and missiles that are exacting horrific carnage in Ukraine. And the UN has just released another damning climate report that documents a litany of broken promises by governments around the world and the failure meet the challenge of climate change.
In reality, there are thousands of LanzaTechs around the globe working to solve the problem of sustainable energy. The main problems are scale and cost, which, of course, are interrelated. As technologies scale up, costs come down and become more competitive. Eventually there is a tipping point and economic logic leads to a transformation.
The problem is, do the geopolitics of the moment or fate of the planet have time to wait for such transitions to occur organically? LT is working with Northwestern University, with Argonne National - a government lab - and with private industry to move forward. As they say, it takes a village.
In the case of Ukraine, we find ourselves in a situation where our ability to meaningfully sanction Russia is constrained by Europe's outsized dependence on Russia oil and gas. Europe has a plan to wean itself from Russian energy over a decade or so, but the threat to European peace and security means that timetable must be reconsidered and accelerated.
In the short run, this is a problem of politics and logistics. Pushing OPEC to pump more oil and finding ways to get more natural gas into the continent. Europe's decision this week to ban Russian coal was a step in that direction.
In the long run, governments of the world need to keep the promises they have made at Paris and Glasgow and, via policy and the application of resources, push the transition to sustainable energy forward faster.
In the U.S., even Sen. Joe Manchin supports the energy provisions of President Biden's Build Back Better legislation. Passing those would not only accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels but also help nations across the globe make that leap. And it would assert American leadership - the kind of story we should all want to see.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.