ATJ Breakout at Soperton: The Pining for Freedom Is Over

At the Anonymous Bar in Prague, the cocktails come from a masked bartender, and the motto is “the impossible is possible”.  On nights where absinthe swirls with the ghosts of the Velvet Revolution—ethanol isn’t just a drink, it’s rebellion in a glass. Freedom gained. Futures rewritten. A reminder that in 1989, impossibility cracked, toppled, and turned into history—when someday became now.

Which is why it feels exactly right to raise a glass today to LanzaJet. Because in the world of SAF, people have long joked that the acronym secretly stands for “Someday, Alternative Feedstocks” or “Subsidize All Fats.” It’s unfair to HEFA—an early technical triumph and a genuine game-changer for aviation—that simply suffers the rarest flaw shared by gold, winning lottery tickets, and sunshine in Seattle: there’s not enough of it.

Still, the Someday problem has hung over the SAF sector for years, invoked as faithfully (and with about the same optimism) as the phrase “government shutdown.” And, Someday has a distinctive sound in Prague — the clink of glasses and the echo of crowds that once gathered in Wenceslas Square, waiting for a future that felt impossible until the moment it wasn’t. And it didn’t happen in Prague—it happened in Soperton, Georgia.

The Wall That Fell: A World First in Soperton

Aviation breakthroughs rarely arrive with confetti—they arrive with certificates and operating permits. Yet last week delivered a genuine break-in-the-sky moment: LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels facility officially began producing ASTM-qualified jet fuel at full commercial scale.

This achievement adds the second non-fossil, globally scalable pillar in aviation—the first non-HEFA pathway to commercial SAF. After more than a decade of research, engineering redlines, catalyst trials, and the occasional hurricane, ATJ is no longer a theory. It’s a throughput.

The leap in magnitude is a relief to anyone wondering, for SAF, “where are the gallons?”. The Freedom Pines Fuels facility represents more than $300 million in committed investment — a scale that dwarfs the 4,000-gallon pilot run produced in 2016. What began as lab beakers and pilot tanks has now become a continuously operating, ASTM-qualified commercial refinery.

Feedstock Freedom: Why Ethanol Changes the Game

HEFA opened the door, but its ceiling was always visible. The global pool of sustainable lipids simply can’t scale to match aviation’s appetite. Ethanol, however, is a different creature entirely—a connector molecule with a global footprint, a flexible carbon backbone, and the ability to be produced from almost anything with fermentable sugars, carbon, or even CO₂.

Ethanol’s feedstock universe includes:

• Agricultural residues

• Energy crops

• Municipal solid waste

• Industrial waste gases

• CO₂ + green hydrogen

• Biomass and biogenic waste streams

With that diversity, ATJ can flip the fossil paradigm—turning local feedstocks into global molecules.

As LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren has long emphasized, the strategy was always two-fold: first, to produce the world’s best intermediate molecule — ethanol — and second, to enable its conversion into high-value fuels. ATJ is the fulfillment of that vision. Ethanol isn’t just versatile; it was chosen as the molecule that could bridge local resources to global markets.

The GTESI viewpoint is simple: systems with more potential input vectors and more flexible processing channels persist and scale. Ethanol is one of the broadest input vectors ever assembled for advanced fuels.

For context: GTESI—the General Theory of Evolutionary Systems & Information—is a practical way to understand why some technologies break through and others stall. It looks at four signals: how well a system turns motion into structure (IPR), keeps story aligned with operations (SCD), maintains trust and cadence (TRFI), and sheds internal pressure as it grows (EED). When these vectors move in the right direction, breakthroughs happen. When they don’t, systems fatigue, stall, or snap.

The implications run deep:

• Energy Security: Any region with biomass—or even industrial emissions—can make SAF.

• Economic Development: Freedom Pines alone generated 300 construction jobs and now supports more than 65 permanent roles.

• Emissions Reduction: ATJ offers strong lifecycle greenhouse-gas improvements with further reductions possible as green hydrogen, renewable electricity, and carbon capture converge.

In short, ethanol radically expands the SAF frontier.

As LanzaJet CEO Jimmy Samartzis put it, the achievement is “a beacon of hope” for producers, communities, and aviation—a new opening through a wall long believed immovable.

And the stakes are enormous: global aviation represents a fuel market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Ethanol-enabled ATJ is no longer a boutique option — it is a pathway capable of competing for a significant share of the global jet fuel system.

Fifteen Years of Persistence: The Road to ATJ

The roots stretch back more than a decade to a bold research question: Can ethanol be turned into aviation-grade synthetic paraffinic kerosene at scale?

LanzaTech, working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), began proving out the chemistry in the early 2010s. What followed is one of the most deliberate, disciplined scale-ups in recent industrial history.

Key milestones:

• 2010–2012: Early proofs of concept with PNNL, DARPA, FAA, and DOE.

• 2015: Lab-scale catalyst breakthrough at PNNL; first gallon evaluated.

• 2016: Pilot-scale production at Freedom Pines—4,000 gallons of ATJ SAF and 600 gallons of renewable diesel, plus a 2,500-data-point technical dossier sent to ASTM.

•2018: ASTM formally approves ethanol as a feedstock for ATJ.

•2018–2019: First commercial passenger flights using ATJ on Virgin Atlantic (transatlantic) and ANA (transpacific).

• 2020: LanzaJet founded by LanzaTech, Mitsui, and partners—including ANA, DOE, and international backers—despite aviation’s COVID shutdown.

This arc is the opposite of “overnight success.” It is 15 years of persistence, or in GTESI terms: a system steadily compressing entropy into structure, iteration into capability, and setbacks into momentum.

Building the FOAK: Obstacles, Hurricanes, and Breakthroughs

Constructing the world’s first commercial ATJ plant is not a journey undertaken by the timid. The LanzaJet team faced:

• Fierce post-COVID supply-chain inflation

• Long-lead equipment shortages

• Integration challenges with FOAK process units

• And, most dramatically, a direct hit from Hurricane Helene in 2024

Yet they finished the project, commissioned the technology, troubleshot the integration, and reached continuous, on-spec production of jet fuel. The FOAK relies on:

• Technip Energies’ Hummingbird® technology for ethanol-to-ethylene

• DOE + LanzaTech’s oligomerization process for converting short-chain molecules into jet-range hydrocarbons

• A fully integrated commercial-scale system that now makes real jet fuel

This wasn’t simply a matter of constructing a plant under difficult conditions — it required integrating multiple First-of-a-Kind technologies into a single, continuously operating system. Technip Energies’ Hummingbird® ethanol-to-ethylene unit, the DOE + LanzaTech oligomerization process, and LanzaJet’s ATJ platform had never before been engineered, built, and operated in a unified configuration. The complexity was unprecedented; the integration challenge, immense.

The Bottom Line

Aviation’s defossilization climbout remains steep:

• Daily production must increase

• Capital must scale

• Market pricing needs stability

• More plants must be built, fast

But for the first time, the sector has two scalable, commercial-ready routes—one lipid-based (HEFA) and one ethanol-based (ATJ). A diversified SAF system is finally emerging. Not because the hard work is done, but because the system has shifted phase—from aspiration to operation. We haven’t quite turned the corner on SAF. But now, we can see the corner.