4 ms·
This is absolutely a 'do not trust these claims without seeing peer-reviewed publication in a reputable journal' territory. For one thing, this is likely to be
by photochemsyn 4y ago
This is absolutely a 'do not trust these claims without seeing peer-reviewed publication in a reputable journal' territory. For one thing, this is likely to be a slow method of capturing CO2 (H2-powered CO2-capture metabolism, called 'chemoautotrophy' is almost certainly going to be much slower than green plant photosynthetic capture rates). Maybe you could speed it up by adding enough hydrogen at optimal rates, but that's not free either.
I don't know a lot about current lab-grown meat approaches, and all the outfits involved seem hush-hush about the main issue, the feedstock (what kind of specific blend of nutrients/growth factors needs to be fed to the cultured muscle cells for optimal growth), but I don't see how chemoautrophic microbial goop becomes 'meat' by any similar process.
There's a lot of hype about carbon capture and reduction to fuel/food/material it seems, but the only proven industrial approach is something like modified Fischer-Tropsch, based on the nitrogen-to-ammonia Haber-Bosch process, which involves taking pure CO2 and H2 feedstocks, converting the CO2 to carbon monoxide, and then reacting the CO with H2 at high pressure and temperature with a suitable catalyst to make a variety of long-chain hydrocarbon fuels. This has been done at scale using coal-sourced CO and natural-gas sourced H2 very successfully, so that's where you'd want to start if you were serious about it. Occidental seems to be getting into it for example, which is sort of what you'd expect, as it's basically just like large-scale petrochemistry.
Lots of Theranos vibes around the whole business though, I'm afraid to say.
- pdonis 4y agoI got a similar feeling from one particular statement in the article: that the founder of Air Protein previously founded a company (Kiverdi) that "now holds dozens of patents on technologies to turn recycled carbon dioxide into alternative fuels". That company was founded in 2008. So where are all these alternative fuels that their patents are for? If any kind of process like this has a hope of working at scale, using it to produce commercial quantities of alternative fuels seems a lot easier than using it to produce commercial quantities of food for humans. So if they can't even produce the alternative fuels at scale, how are they going to do it for food?
- adrian_b 4y agoThey appear to have given very vague information about what kind of bacteria they culture. Assuming that they have told the truth and they feed their bacteria with carbon dioxide, dihydrogen and dioxygen, then those bacteria are not powered by the H2 with CO2 reaction (which is possible only in anaerobic conditions, by acetogenic or methanogenic bacteria/archaea), but by the oxidation of hydrogen. The use of the word "fermentation" is completely inappropriate. Regardless what kind of bacteria they are using, the bacteria do not carry out any kind of fermentation (which refers to obtaining energy from large molecules, either by converting them into isomers or by breaking them down into smaller molecules). In any case slowness is not their problem, because they do not use air as the source of CO2, but they use concentrated CO2, which accelerates a lot the CO2 capture. Also, if the bacteria oxidize dihydrogen, they dispose of much more energy than the anaerobic bacteria which also capture CO2, so a doubling time of a few hours is believable. What is unlikely is that they can produce their proteins at a cost comparable with, e.g., chicken meat or proteins extracted from legumes, when they use relatively expensive concentrated CO2 and dihydrogen to feed the bacteria and also a presumably expensive process to separate the protein and convert it into a product resembling meat.
- quickthrower2 4y agoI thought the same thing. It would be cool to work there but I would do DD first! And if it is overly secretive or NDA ish then nah.