In a Washington farm town, a plant now turns captured carbon dioxide and water into 100 barrels a day of jet fuel, and no crude oil touches the process at any step
On a dry stretch of Eastern Washington, a plant the size of a few warehouses hums beside a runway.
Steel cells and tanks of liquid sit under an open sky.
A pipe carries in something invisible.
The facility is called AirPlant One, and it sits in Moses Lake, a farming town in the Columbia Basin better known for irrigation circles than chemical engineering.
Another pipe carries out something that can fuel a jet.
Nothing here looks like a farm, a refinery or an oil field.
So what is actually happening inside those tanks to make that swap possible?
How do you turn carbon dioxide and water into jet fuel
The process starts with an electrolyzer unit that uses renewable electricity to split water and recombine its components with captured carbon dioxide, building the carbon chains that make up hydrocarbon fuel. The plant captures CO2 from the air, combines it with water and electricity, and converts those inputs into finished fuel molecules.
That matters because it skips a step every other clean jet fuel has needed until now. Most sustainable aviation fuel on the market is made from used cooking oil, animal fat or crop waste, and those farm based supply chains compete with land and food production.
The company says its E-Jet fuel differs from plant based sustainable aviation fuel because it does not depend on farmland at all. And because the finished hydrocarbon molecules are built from scratch rather than refined from an existing oil, the output can be tuned to match what a jet engine already burns.
The resulting jet fuel is chemically identical to conventional jet fuel and could cut lifecycle carbon dioxide emissions by up to 90 percent, with no new engines or fuel lines needed anywhere downstream.
What the plant actually looks like on the ground
The facility is called AirPlant One, and it sits in Moses Lake, a farming town in the Columbia Basin better known for irrigation circles than chemical engineering. It held its ribbon cutting ceremony as the first facility of its kind in the country to produce fuel this way.
So this was not a demonstration unit tucked inside a university lab. It was built to run at a working production scale, with a stated capacity in the range of 100 barrels of finished fuel a day, and that output is already being sold rather than stockpiled for testing.
Officials and partners showed up for the opening. A state governor, a major airline and a large software company all joined the ceremony as the plant began commercial runs, and the airline was not there for a photo opportunity alone, since it has fuel on order.
What the hardest numbers actually show
The company behind the plant is Twelve, a Berkeley based industrial technology firm, and the fuel itself carries a brand name, E-Jet. Twelve says the fuel already meets ASTM standards for use in commercial aircraft and required no changes to planes, engines or airport fuel systems.
That certification detail is the part engineers care about most, since a synthetic fuel that needs a different engine or a different fuel pump never leaves the lab, no matter how clean it looks on paper. Meeting an existing aviation fuel specification means an airline can blend or swap it in without touching the aircraft at all.
Which is why the plant opened with buyers already lined up rather than searching for them. A major software company backed the project financially and locked in some of the output for its own travel emissions.
Twelve said the backer also committed through a climate fund arrangement and a separate offtake agreement tied to business travel. That is an unusual role for a tech company, buying barrels of jet fuel to offset its employees’ flights.
Where this approach still runs into limits
None of that erases the scale gap between one plant and an industry that burns roughly a hundred billion gallons of jet fuel a year worldwide. A hundred barrels a day is a rounding error against that number, and the company has said plainly that this plant is just the first node in a larger network it still needs to build.
Even so, the economics of power to liquid fuel depend entirely on cheap, abundant, carbon free electricity. Every molecule of fuel carries the cost of the power used to make it, and Moses Lake sits near hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River.
That siting choice is a quiet lesson for the rest of the industry chasing clean fuels and clean power together, the same logic behind pairing a light bulb’s wasted glow with a sensor through indoor harvesting or storing a grid’s surplus the way a spinning flywheel does in a Shanghai test cell.
What the first flights suggest about what comes next
Twelve has framed the Moses Lake plant as proof of concept rather than an endpoint. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Nicholas Flanders, said the team broke ground on AirPlant One believing fuel could be made from renewable electricity and air anywhere in the world.
For now, the honest summary is narrower and more interesting than a sweeping claim. A plant in a basin farming town proved that jet fuel built entirely from air and water can meet certification, reach an airport and go into a tank without anyone touching the aircraft.
That is a real, measured event, not a forecast. Whether the model scales fast enough to matter for aviation’s climate math remains an open question, one that will be answered one more plant, one more offtake deal, one more flight at a time.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
