Company: Twelve
Title:Â Co-founder & Chief Science Officer
Industry: Technology
Hometown:Â Houston, Texas
Notable in 2023: Started the first commercial-grade facility for producing sustainable aviation fuel made from CO2 and water.
Etosha Cave wants to help the aviation industry break its dependence on fossil fuels by making fuel from air. Cave is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Twelve, a startup that is using renewable energy and water to transform carbon dioxide into jet fuel.
"What a lot of airlines and large Fortune 500 companies are realizing is that the aviation sector is very hard to decarbonize," Cave said at the CES tech trade show in January. Solutions such as battery-powered planes and hydrogen will take years to come to scale, she said.
"We can make a drop-in replacement," Cave said. "We can decarbonize within a short-time frame."
Twelve broke ground on a commercial-scale plant in Washington State last July. The facility will begin producing sustainable aviation fuel later this year with an initial capacity of five barrels per day or 40,000 gallons per year. Twelve's first customers will be Alaska Airlines, Microsoft and Shopify.
I admire the leaders who can rise to the need of the moment. Whether it is empathy when their team needs to be listened to, inspiration that motivates large groups to do great things, or patience when things go awry, great leaders can switch into each mode.Etosha CaveCo-founder & Chief Science Officer, Twelve
Cave has been passionate about clean energy and the climate since she was teenager, but the Stanford PhD mechanical engineer didn't originally see herself as an entrepreneur.
"I kind of saw myself as being a scientist in a lab and developing something new and novel helping deploy it as part of a larger company," Cave told the Avionics Fortnightly podcast in 2021.
But she realized that only a handful of people were working on carbon transformation, and there was not a large company developing a system to support such efforts.
"If we wanted to see this come into the world we would need to bring it," Cave told the podcast.
"Seeing over and over again that taking a risk does lead to something that is fun and creative and beautiful and successful, that positive feedback loop is what keeps me going in the startup – because it is a risk ultimately," she said.
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