From Aqueducts to Carbon Ducts — LanzaTech and the New Carbon Infrastructure of Civilization

38 AD. A balcony of the palace complex, the northwest angle of the Palatine Hill.

The new emperor Caligula stands before the Senate and People of Rome, his voice rising above a tumult of applause as togas ripple like surf in the sunlight. The crowd strains to catch his words.

“What did he say?” asks one. “Roma aeterna est, et quod eam aeternam facit est eius infrastructura! Hic nulla arena sine calce est,” replies the other. (“Rome is eternal, and what makes her eternal is her infrastructure. Here, there is no sand without lime.”)

“The water!” says the first with joy. “The cost…” sighs the other with dread.

He was announcing the building of two great aqueducts — the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus — to carry Apennine waters over stone and valley in the service of civilization. Arches upon arches, miles of conduit, a river of stone built to last forever.

Caligula would not live to see them completed, but they endure still. Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian — even Pope Adrian I — rebuilt them across centuries, the Aqua Claudia becoming a living artery of civilization. When the empire faltered, the water still ran. Rome learned that plumbing was power.

II. The New Curatores Aquarum

Two millennia later, humanity faces another crisis of flow — not water this time, but carbon. The world’s smokestacks are our broken aqueducts, spilling what should be contained, refined, and redirected.

Into this new Forum steps LanzaTech, the modern curator aquarum of carbon. With a €40 million grant from the European Union’s Innovation Fund, the company is constructing a first-of-its-kind integrated CCUS system in Norway. Like the Aqua Claudia, it is part architecture, part alchemy — designed to turn waste into wealth, and chaos into cohesion.

LanzaTech’s second-generation bioreactor will consume greenhouse gases from Eramet Norway’s smelter furnaces, producing 23.5 kilotons (8 million U.S. gallons) of ethanol each year. The project’s co-product — purified, liquefied CO₂ — will flow north for permanent geological storage beneath the North Sea. In total, the system targets a 97 percent reduction in emissions: an aqueduct of carbon flowing backward, restoring balance to the atmosphere rather than draining it.

“Every molecule we reuse is a molecule we don’t lose,” said Jennifer Holmgren, LanzaTech’s CEO. It is Caligula’s dream reborn — not in marble, but in microbes.

III. The BECCS Revolution — Vespasian’s Repair

Every great system eventually cracks under its own weight. The Aqua Claudia collapsed a decade after completion; Vespasian rebuilt it. So too, the carbon economy must be reconstructed — not abandoned, but strengthened through Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

• Gevo has become a Vespasian of the American Plains, anchoring its operations on a 1-million-ton-per-year carbon sequestration well beneath its North Dakota ethanol plant, monetizing permanent storage through verified carbon-removal credits.
• SunGas Renewables, in Arkansas, is developing the Beaver Lake Green Methanol project, targeting –90 g CO₂e/MJ, a monument to negative carbon intensity supported by EU and U.S. credits alike.
• Aemetis, in California, aims to inject two million tons per year into deep wells, a feat any Roman aedile would applaud — public works on a planetary scale.

Yet even as the arches rise, the curatores aquarum of ABLC’s Due Diligence Wolfpack remind us that the flow of optimism must be tempered by physics. David Dodds warned that point-source capture still bears a parasitic energy load of 25 to 40 percent of plant output — a siphon on productivity few projects can afford. For carbon utilization, the economics grow harsher: to compete with commodity chemicals, captured CO₂ would need to be priced near €750–€800 per ton, an order of magnitude beyond current market value. Without massive reductions in capture cost or breakthroughs in cheap renewable power, CCUS risks becoming an aqueduct without a spring — a grand structure leading nowhere.

IV. The Utilization Era — Hadrian’s Extension

When Hadrian restored the Aqua Claudia in 123 AD, he didn’t merely repair; he expanded, extending arches across the valleys between the Caelian and Palatine Hills. Today’s carbon engineers are doing the same, extending value into new frontiers:

• LanzaJet converts recycled ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel, proving that waste carbon can fly.
• Twelve and other Power-to-Liquids pioneers use captured CO₂ and green hydrogen to synthesize hydrocarbons, reanimating the chemistry of flight and freight.
• Industrial Microbes transforms CO₂ into durable materials like acrylic acid — carbon fixed into permanence, Hadrianic in ambition.

Each is laying down new arches in the long aqueduct of civilization — chemical, digital, economic — turning the pollutant into a pillar.

V. The Policy Arches — Pope Adrian’s Restoration

Centuries later, Pope Adrian I rebuilt Rome’s aqueducts as acts of faith — a declaration that infrastructure itself is sacred. Europe’s policymakers now face a similar test of cohesion.

Even in a region celebrated for climate leadership, the Wolfpack warned, the financial plumbing of CCUS remains half-built. The EU Innovation Fund is generous — €40 million for LanzaTech’s Norway project alone — yet the long-term monetization pathways for stored or recycled carbon remain uncertain. Under the EU ETS and the new Carbon Removal Certification Framework, ownership of an avoided ton of CO₂ is still unsettled: emitter, capturer, or offtaker?

Without clarity, carbon-value chains stall. Offtakers hesitate to sign contracts when registries clash across borders, and lenders discount future carbon revenues because ETS prices have swung from €50 to €90 per ton in a single year. As one Brussels analyst quipped, “We’ve built the aqueduct, but the water tariff keeps changing.” Until Europe harmonizes crediting, certification, and price stability, even its best CCUS projects risk drying in the bureaucratic sun.

VI. The Civilization of Flow

From Caligula to Holmgren, from Aqua Claudia to carbon conduits beneath the North Sea, the story remains the same: civilization is maintenance. Every era builds its aqueducts — water, electricity, carbon — and learns that permanence comes not from conquest, but from cohesion.

Beneath all this engineering grandeur lies a simple truth — the same one the Romans knew. Infrastructure is only as strong as its inputs. The entire CCUS revolution depends on solving Grand Challenge #1: Feedstock Preprocessing. As James Lane often notes, “Feedstocks are way, way, way, way too expensive.” Until the bioeconomy can deliver a €50-per-ton universal standard feedstock, deep decarbonization will remain a luxury good, dependent on credits rather than market logic. Without abundant, affordable feedstock, even the best carbon aqueducts will run dry.

If the twentieth century was the age of oil wells, the twenty-first is the age of carbon wells — reservoirs not of fuel, but of future. The innovators of CCUS are today’s curatores aquarum, teaching carbon to flow uphill into value, holding the line between chaos and order.

Like the Roman engineers of old, they aren’t just building pipes. They’re building permanence.