PARIS — On the opening day of the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee announced that California-based clean energy startup Twelve plans to set up an industrial facility in Moses Lake to make jet fuel from electricity, water and air.
Inslee also announced that another sustainable aviation pioneer working on hydrogen-powered flight, ZeroAvia, will expand its facility in Everett. By the middle of next year, ZeroAvia plans to increase its current 30-strong workforce there by a factor of five.
Inslee said the two companies add to a “rapidly growing ecosystem of world-leading innovators located in Washington state who are building the future of sustainable aviation fuels and zero-emission propulsion systems.”
Startup Twelve, named for the atomic mass of carbon, aims to make carbon products typically derived from fossil fuels using only renewable energy, water and waste CO2.
Beside the Washington state booth at the Paris Air Show, Inslee announced “the imminent groundbreaking of a truly green jet fuel production facility with a company that uses CO2 and water to make a truly clean, climate change-defeating jet fuel.”
He said with sustainability at the top of the agenda for the aviation companies gathered in Paris, “I really don’t think you could find a more promising technology than Twelve to be a principal component of that sustainable aviation fuel supply chain.”
Electricity from renewable sources, such as solar, wind or hydroelectric, is used to extract hydrogen from water and combine it with waste CO2 to produce hydrocarbons like those derived from fossil fuels.
Twelve CEO Nicholas Flanders said the CO2 will come from biomass waste, such as is produced by ethanol or food-processing plants, pulp and paper mills, and landfills.
Because it’s made with electricity, Twelve’s synthetic version of sustainable aviation fuel is often called e-fuel. It has branded its product E-Jet.
Twelve chose Moses Lake, Flanders said, “because of the availability of green power, through hydropower, and sources of biogenic CO2, which is the carbon feedstock for our fuel, and the great policies of Washington state that are accelerating the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel, green hydrogen and green power.”
“Washington is such a hub for aerospace in the U.S., it makes sense that it would be the first place for this fuel that is really going to transform the industry,” he added.
Twelve’s project will provide 50 to 100 construction jobs to build the plant and 20 full-time “green jobs” in Moses Lake to operate it. Flanders said the first e-fuel produced there should be fueling flights starting next year.
“Then in 2025 and beyond, it’s all about scaling millions and millions of gallons of capacity of this fuel,” he said. “This is a really transformative step as a company because this is the world’s first commercial e-jet plant.”
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Though fossil fuel-derived energy may be used at some point in production and distribution of e-fuel — perhaps through transportation, for example — it is expected to have 90% lower life cycle emissions than regular jet fuel.
Twelve was formed in 2016 by three Stanford University classmates: Chief Technology Officer Kendra Kuhl, a chemistry Ph.D.; Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave, a mechanical engineering Ph.D.; and Flanders, who has a master’s degree in business and environment.
The startup was incubated, Silicon Valley style, at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab at the University of California. Flanders said it has raised about $250 million in venture capital and has more than 200 employees.
Flanders said that in Twelve’s labs and manufacturing facility in the Bay Area it has scaled up its proprietary electrolyzing reactors to “suitcase-sized” models, dozens of which will run at the planned Moses Lake facility.
Washington state is not providing direct funding to Twelve, but recently passed substantial tax credits for large-scale producers of clean energy and is streamlining the permitting to accelerate building clean technology facilities.
A groundbreaking event for the Moses Lake facility is planned for July 11.
Separately Monday, Inslee announced a grant from the state’s reserve fund to ZeroAvia, which is developing a hydrogen-powered plane, to expand its facility at Paine Field in Everett.
A startup with facilities in the U.K. and California, ZeroAvia’s system produces electricity from hydrogen fuel cells to power zero-emission airplanes, and is initially retrofitting its system to a series of existing aircraft.
It has so far raised about $150 million. About $20 million of that is public money to fund research, most of it from the U.K. government.
The rest is private investment from venture capital firms focused on clean technologies, including Breakthrough Energy, funded by BiIl Gates, and Amazon’s Climate Pledge fund.
American Airlines and United have placed provisional orders.
Though the size of the newly announced Washington state grant was not disclosed, ZeroAvia founder and CEO, Russian-born Val Miftakhov, said in an interview in Paris it’s of the same order as a previous state Department of Commerce $350,000 grant to ZeroAvia in January 2022 to set up its research facility at Paine Field airport.
The Everett site currently employs 30 people researching electric propulsion and retrofitting a retired Alaska Airlines Q400 turboprop to run on hydrogen.
Youcef Abdelli, ZeroAvia’s chief technical officer for propulsion who heads the Everett site, said in Paris he plans to hire rapidly and to have between 80 and 100 employees in Everett by year end and 150 by the middle of next year.
Although aerospace companies generally are having a hard time hiring talent, Abdelli said others “don’t have the same passion, the same sense of mission and purpose” that ZeroAvia offers and he’s confident he’ll attract the engineers and technicians he needs.
Miftakhov described Everett as “a hugely important location for us” because of the availability of aerospace and electrical engineers in the region and the hub of aerospace industry peers in the state also pushing toward sustainable flight.
In a statement, Miftakhov added that the state funding “enables us to push forward quickly on our targets for commercial flight of up to 20-seat aircraft by 2025, and up to 80-seat aircraft by 2027.”
ZeroAvia’s planned zero-carbon-emitting propulsion system is in the developmental stage.
In 2020, ZeroAvia achieved an eight-minute hydrogen-powered flight of a six-seat Piper airplane. The U.K. government that year gave the company a $16 million grant to develop a 19-seat hydrogen-powered aircraft capable of a 350-mile flight.
The Piper completed more than 30 flights. But in a setback, the plane crashed in 2021 when the switching software between the backup battery system and the hydrogen fuel system caused the power controllers to lock up.
“It really forced the company to get more discipline around a number of areas,” Miftakhov said. “We revamped our test processes. We set up a professional flight-testing organization.”
In January this year, ZeroAvia achieved in the U.K a 10-minute hydrogen-powered flight of a 19-seat Dornier 228. That aircraft has completed eight flights since then.
In May, Alaska Airlines donated the Q400 regional turboprop, also known as the De Havilland Canada Dash 8 aircraft, to be retrofitted with ZeroAvia’s hydrogen-electric propulsion system.
ZeroAvia aims to certify its propulsion system and then retrofit it and certify it to fly passengers on a various existing small aircraft. The first such product, which Miftakhov said he expects to certify in 2025, is a 13-seat Cessna Grand Caravan.
The retrofit of the Alaska Airlines Dash 8 will be the biggest step up. The Dornier flying now requires 600 kilowatts of power. The Dash 800 will require about 3 megawatts of power.
Miftakhov said the company expects to have to raise another $100 million to get the Grand Caravan certified to carry passengers.
And he said it will take about a further $200 million to get the Dash 8 through the same process.
The bigger plane will require different, higher-temperature fuel cells and will need a more complex geared drive shaft instead of the direct drive shaft on the smaller plane.
Miftakhov said he expects it will take to 2028 or 2029 to get that model certified for passenger service.
Another startup, Universal Hydrogen, is chasing the same goal of hydrogen-powered flight. In March, it flew for 15 minutes at Moses Lake a Dash 8 converted to hydrogen power.
Both companies face the challenge of creating an infrastructure to deliver “green hydrogen” — produced using sustainable energy — to airports around the globe.
For ZeroAvia, it’s a matter of tapping into electricity from renewable sources and building electrolyzers to generate the hydrogen using that electricity.
“With electrolysis, we’re sort of where we were with solar panels and winds 10 or 15 years ago,” Miftakhov said. “The capacity growth is just at the beginning right now and we’ll see orders of magnitude higher production capacity.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately said the atomic number of Carbon is 12. That is the atomic mass.
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