The carbon dioxide your flight just pumped into the atmosphere is going to power your next one.
That's not a metaphor. That's not a marketing slogan. That is the actual, literal business model of a company called Twelve, and airlines are signing contracts on it.
Is this bigger than Southwest allowing passengers to choose a seat? We think so.
Twelve takes CO2 out of the air, runs it through an electrochemical reactor with water and renewable electricity, and turns it into jet fuel. No new planes. No new engines. No modifications whatsoever. The same fuel that goes in the tank today, made from the same carbon that's been cooking the planet. It just goes round and round again.
Okay but how
Twelve calls it industrial photosynthesis. Which sounds like something a cheesy college professor made up, but stay with me here — because it's pretty much what it is.
Trees take CO2 from the air and, with the help of water and sunlight, turn it into sugar for energy and growth. They've been doing this forever. Twelve just figured out how to do it industrially, in a building, using electricity instead of sunlight.
The core of their technology is a reactor called Opus™. Inside it is a component they named the Leaf — a membrane electrode assembly that functions the same way a plant leaf does. CO2 and water go in. Syngas comes out. Syngas becomes jet fuel.
Their first plant — AirPlant™ One (which I think we can all agree is a baller name) — is in Moses Lake, Washington. It runs on hydropower and pulls CO2 from a nearby ethanol plant. First commercial flights powered by it are expected this year.
Did we mention the company is named Twelve? As in the atomic weight of carbon. As in the element itself. They named the company after the thing they're trying to fix. Who the heck are these people? Well… let’s get into that.
The people who built it
Three Stanford PhDs met in the lab studying CO2 electrocatalysis. Ya know — just your run-of-the-mill way to meet friends.
Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl were doing their PhDs side by side. Nicholas Flanders met Etosha at the Stanford Space Club — not a networking event, not an intramural kickball game, a space club — and the three of them decided to take a decade of academic research and build a company out of it.
Etosha grew up in Houston near an abandoned oil and gas site leaking chemicals into the water table. She later got a PhD studying the exact molecule she grew up watching ruin her community. When the three of them went to raise money, Silicon Valley VCs weren't interested. Too complicated. Too capital-intensive. Dare I say… too far out in Left Field?
So she lived in her car for months to keep the company alive. That's who's building this. Good luck competing against someone like that.
Today, Twelve has raised over $700M. Alaska Airlines. British Airways. United Airlines. Amazon, Coca-Cola, the Department of Defense. And NASA, who wants Twelve's technology to manufacture jet fuel from CO2 in remote locations — including, eventually, other planets.
The honest take
The part where we keep it real: Sustainable aviation fuel currently costs 2 to 5x more than conventional jet fuel. AirPlant One produces 50,000 gallons a year. Global aviation burns roughly 100 billion gallons a year. The math, at this moment, does not work.
But here's the thing about transformational technology — it never starts cheap.
Solar panels cost ~$76 per watt in 1977. Today they cost less than $0.30. A gigabyte of storage cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 80s. Your phone now has 256 of them.
The cost curve on things that work always bends down. Twelve's job right now isn't to be cheap. It's to be real. And it's real — AirPlant One is producing, and airlines are signing.
The bet isn't whether this gets affordable. It's how fast.
If they pull this off
Europe running out of jet fuel? No longer a problem. Don't worry, Tommy — your intra-Europe flights while you're on your family vacation won't be canceled. Crisis averted.
Aviation accounts for roughly 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. It's one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize — you can't plug a 747 into a socket. And biofuels compete with food for land. Your lawn equipment just got electrified. Planes are going to take a little longer.
Twelve is building the one solution that doesn't require anything to change except where the fuel comes from.
And once you can make fuel from air, you can make it anywhere there's air, water, and electricity. Which is, to be clear, practically everywhere. Including the places humans haven't gone yet.
We covered Boom Supersonic in Issue #4. Can we matchmake these two companies? Imagine the press release when the fuel powering Boom’s first commercial flight came from the same sky it's flying through.
The road for Twelve will not be easy. Some may say impossible. But nothing worth doing is easy.
Go to the field: twelve.co
Want to work out there?
Twelve is hiring. Electrochemists, material scientists, engineers, and people who nerd out on "industrial photosynthesis". If Etosha Cave slept in her car to build this thing, you can probably handle the commute.
Open roles → twelve.co/careers
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