Auckland - New Zealand-based clean technology company LanzaTech has attracted US$18M Series B financing from investors led by China focused venture capital firm Qiming Ventures.

LanzaTech uses proprietary bacteria to convert industrial waste gases into fuels and chemicals. The financing follows LanzaTech's signing with Baosteel, China's largest steel and iron conglomerate, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to commercialize its technologies for producing ethanol from steel mill off gases.

Gary Rieschel, Founder and Managing Director of Qiming, says LanzaTech represents a great opportunity for China.

"The significance of its technology means that fuel can be produced with no impact on food supply or land use," he says. "Using industrial waste gases curbs GHG emissions and so maintains manufacturing sustainability in China."

Qiming Ventures has been joined by Softbank China Venture Capital and two existing investors from the Series A round, Khosla Ventures in the USA and New Zealand based K1W1. Vinod Khosla says LanzaTech has demonstrated a process that allows the use of a broad spectrum of waste gas resources. Non food resources such as industrial waste gas, syngas from biomass and reformed natural gas can become a resource for high volume fuels and plastics.

"It is exciting how some imagination and creativity can take a wide variety of industrial off gases and potentially other pollution and efficiently turn it into high value biofuels and bio chemicals," Mr Khosla says.

Since the Series A funding in 2007, LanzaTech has proven its process using unconditioned 'dirty' gas streams directly from a NZ Steel mill in Auckland to make fuel ethanol. Dr Sean Simpson, co founder of LanzaTech says the funding will enable LanzaTech to further accelerate commercialization of its process.

"We plan to have a pre-commercial plant operational in 2011 with plans to quickly scale to a commercial facility producing over 200 million liters of ethanol per year." Dr Simpson says. "The funding will also see expansion of the company's focus to include the use of CO2 as a feedstock gas."

LanzaTech estimates its bacteria-based approach could produce over 120 billion liters of ethanol per year using existing steel mill gases alone.