Twelve, a Moses Lake based company, commemorates start of second phase

MOSES LAKE — The co-founders of Twelve, a company experimenting with a new process for manufacturing jet fuel, held a ribbon cutting event at their new facility in Moses Lake Wednesday, almost three years after their groundbreaking ceremony. 

The company’s co-founders Nicholas Flanders, Kendra Kuhl and Etosha Cave were joined by Gov. Bob Ferguson and other notable guests, including Washington state Sen. Judy Warnick and state Rep. Tom Dent, for the ribbon cutting.  

Ferguson called companies like Twelve – the future of the industry.  

“It's good for the environment, it's good for our state's economy, it's good for local jobs, and Twelve is certainly leading in this way,” Ferguson told a large gathering of guests prior to the ribbon cutting. 

Ferguson said state government also has a role to play in encouraging businesses like Twelve. 

“To be a leader in any industry, it takes many different things. One of those (is) on the policy side having political leadership and policy leadership, and I think we've seen that in a bipartisan way,” Ferguson said. “And we've already been talking for the Senate about, ‘hey, what are things we can do the next legislative session to be helpful.’” 

That could include tax credits, Ferguson added. “I think everything is on the table,” he said. 

The company uses raw materials to produce hydrocarbons, which can then be adapted to produce jet fuel and other products, said Nick Taylor, Twelve’s engineering manager. Currently, the company’s focus is jet fuel and naphthalene, used in commercial and industrial applications.  

“We start with carbon dioxide and water, and we run those through some electrolyzer reactors,” Taylor explained. “In those reactors we produce what's called syngas; it's a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That syngas mixture we feed to the Fischer Tropez reactor. That FT reactor takes that syngas and reacts it and turns it into liquid hydrocarbon molecules, so we end up with a big, wide range of those hydrocarbon molecule links. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is to get a jet fuel.” 

And then the next process begins.  

“We send it to another reactor called the hydrocracker,” he said. “You can think of it like a pair of chemical scissors. You take these long chains, react with hydrogen, and it cuts them up back into the length of that we're trying to get to, get to the jet fuel.” 

And what’s left can be recycled, he said. 

While the process works, it’s more expensive than existing jet fuels. Flanders said the next task is to make Twelve’s product more competitive.  

“Our focus is on driving down the cost of our production as quickly as possible,” he said. “We do that in a few ways. First is by scaling to even larger facilities and building a repeatable plant design that becomes much lower cost over time. We've seen that with renewables, with batteries, with LNG, with air separation plants. We're doing the same thing with e-fuels.” 

The second critical factor is reliable power at low cost, which is one reason the company came to Moses Lake.  

Cave addressed this when she spoke to the Columbia Basin Herald following the ribbon cutting. She said it’s been a long time getting to production, starting with research she and Kuhl were doing at Stanford during their PhD work. Once they graduated, they started to consider the opportunities gathered in their research. 

“We started to ask the question: ‘Can we make something of this, can we continue the research outside of university and keep it going, bring it to industry and have an impact in manufacturing and carbon transformation?’” Cave said.  

The two teamed up with Flanders, started looking for funding and building their business – a process that has lasted about a decade.  

“It’s quite the life milestone to see it come together,” she said.

    Twelve co-founder Nicholas Flanders (right) shakes hands with Gov. Bob Ferguson during the governor’s visit to their facility Wednesday for a ribbon cutting ceremony
  

    Holding tanks for e-jet fuel produced at Twelve.
  

    Jet fuel is the primary product produced by Twelve, a Moses Lake company. The process begins with water and carbon dioxide.