8 ms·

Fats from thin air: Startup makes butter using CO2 and water

44 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

rajnathani 2y ago
No details of the nutrition facts on the company’s website. Like with all the details of the fat-soluble vitamins and the fatty acids profile. Anyone has a link?
isaacfrond 2y ago
I guess the price of the CO2 butter is vastly higher than that of real butter. So this is probably not going to fly. But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center. Seeing stuff that you can actually do with captured CO2 is surely helpful. I saw the same problem with recycled plastic. We had large plastic recycling plant here. It basically got its raw material free, yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change.
- dnpls 2y ago
  "The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor’s become affordable to the masses – either the same cost as animal fats or less," Gates wrote. "Savor has a good chance of success here, because the key steps of their fat-production process already work in other industries." So it seems they're onto the price problem already. If they can bring the price down fast enough, maybe there's a chance for this product.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    They might have a chance too. There are plenty of ways of making edible fats from crude oil, but it is generally not allowed by governments (hard to make it pure enough to be safe, protectionism by the food industry). However, CO2 derived fats are much harder to argue against. That makes this one of the places where something that makes little thermodynamic sense might actually make financial sense nonetheless.
- adrianN 2y ago
  The most profitable thing you can do with captured carbon is probably either burning it or turning it into plastic. The problem is that it is orders of magnitude cheaper to pump carbon from the ground instead of capturing it from the air. The second problem is that burning the captured carbon is forbidden if you want to use carbon capture to reverse global warming.
- poulpy123 2y ago
  I would say the issue is more it's not a real butter, because it could be sold cheap as a byproduct of the process
- az09mugen 2y ago
  I don't know how it's working, but I imagine a "killer app" could be in space stations by capturing CO2 emitted by astronauts and produce stuff.
  - adwn 2y ago
    > in space stations by capturing CO2 emitted by astronauts and produce stuff You mean all ten of them? https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/ https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/
    - az09mugen 2y ago
      Thanks for that link ^^ I looked a little bit into the numbers [0] and mostly [1], and it's something around 1 kg of CO2/day/person. According to the guardian [2], with water, electricity, ammonia, nutrients and 2 kgs of CO2, you can make 1 kg of some kind of food replacing the meat. I don't say it's easy to do but maybe it's worth exploring to lower the quantity of food astronauts need to bring with them to space. [0] : https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-much-will-be-the-human-breathing-CO2-emission-factor https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-much-will-be-the-human... [1] : https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/how-much-co2-do-humans-produce/ https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/how-much-co... [2] : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/05/carbon-dioxide-co2-capture-utilisation-products-vodka-jet-fuel-protein https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/05/carbon-d...
- setopt 2y ago
  This strategy is called CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage), as opposed to CCS (without the U). As someone who as previously worked in the field, I think it’s a bad idea. Carbon capture is expensive. Even if you capture at concentrated point sources like power plants or factories, and capture only between 80-95% of the emitted CO2, it’s still quite expensive (e.g. natural gas power can be roughly 25% more expensive when you add carbon capture), and it’s already hard enough to build the capture capacity that we would need to make an impact on global warming. The goal of paying for all that should be to remove those emissions from the world, whereas most utilization processes end up with some or all of that CO2 in the atmosphere in the end. In which case you have wasted energy and money while not saving the environment.
  - segfaltnh 2y ago
    Yes but if you generate food from plant emissions that reduces demand for livestock, the net production of CO2 drops, in theory. Your concerns make a ton of sense for some CCUS cases though.
    - setopt 2y ago
      Sure – but I’m willing to bet that we can make butter far more efficiently by cutting out CO2 as a middle man, and e.g. utilizing plant waste more directly in a chemical plant. To be clear: I’m not saying that all research on CO2 utilization is wasted. I’m all for e.g. research into CO2 as a heat pump refrigerant, or feeding CO2 from composting into green houses. But the moment you want to use either industrial CO2 or direct air capture for something else then offsetting global warming, then I think it’s a bad idea.
      - segfaltnh 2y ago
        Interesting, thanks for clarifying. I'm inclined to agree, though I think the world has a place for both types of technology.
- ricardobayes 2y ago
  It can still work in developing countries where the cost of switching is lower due to the "newer" things not being present yet. Think of fiber lines being laid out first in some areas, so they have a better connectivity than some first-world places. Same with payment systems. China and India are arguably a lot better with payments because they simply skipped the credit card phase. You can literally pay a street vendor in India through a QR code.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > China and India are arguably a lot better with payments because they simply skipped the credit card phase. You can literally pay a street vendor in India through a QR code. I'm not sure I'd say they're "a lot better". Better than the ridiculous US signing a paper bill, yes, but the US is not the standard, they're decades behind it. They use paper cheques ffs! In most of the EU contactless payments that work by card or phone over NFC with well supported/integrated app that work all the same regardless of your bank or exact method of payment sounds much better to me than needing a separate app for the payment provider in question, having to open it to scan a QR code. My current payment flow is I take out my phone, unlock it, tap; or if I don't have my phone / battery is dead, I take out my card, tap it. Having to have a phone, unlock, open a specific app, scan a QR code (muck with light, angle, focus, etc.) and then fill payment details sounds much worse UX.
    - ricardobayes 2y ago
      I wasn't necessarily talking about the US, although I see how you can come to that conclusion. I'm more talking about some other, very developed countries like Germany, in which most vendors don't even accept "normal" debit/credit cards. It's mostly cash only, or a "girocard" which is a German domestic card type. In other countries, I agree that NFC payments made it simpler, although moving money between B2C users is still a bit lacking.
    - olalonde 2y ago
      Still can't do peer to peer pay transfers, still need a bank account, still need to apply for a physical card, still need to pay high transaction fees, still need to fill out credit card information when shopping online, no way to list who is authorized to charge your card and revoke their access, still need a costly terminal to accept payments, etc. Having used both systems, I'd say WeChat and Alipay's payment systems are vastly superior to credit cards in terms of UX.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center If you discount all externalities that is. Same as cleaning being a "cost centre", until you think what happens if nobody is there to clean, trash piles up, etc.
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    True, but with cleaning you see the price of not doing it very quickly. With carbon capture, not so much.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      I mean it's not quick, but everyone not brain dead can see weather getting more extreme and more unpredictable. And when you have basically scientific consensus that it's only going to get worse... it's pretty obvious what the ramifications will be. It's hard to estimate the costs, but massive would be an understatement.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Renewable energy, and particularly _wind_ energy, pose a weird new economic question; what if energy is sometimes free (or indeed has a small negative cost; it's generally cheaper to overproduce than to halt the turbines, if you can sink the overproduction somewhere), but you can't control when that happens, or even predict with high accuracy when that happens? We can expect to see a lot more things trying to answer that question.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  > yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change. Well, about that example: 1. Obligatory first point: This is an example of a systematic problem of capitalism, which by default promotes (corporate) profit seeking over other considerations and interests, making it difficult to achieve them. 2. The state could have, theoretically, taxed the purchase of new plastic products, and/or given tax benefits for switching from new-plastic to recycled-plastic, reversing the "cheaper" incentive. 3. There are uses of recycled plastic where new plastic is just, well, just note used (probably because it provides no benefit). Example: Bricks for the construction industry: https://plaex.ca/about-plaex-building-systems-mortarless-interlocking-construction-blocks-1 https://plaex.ca/about-plaex-building-systems-mortarless-int... caveat: Have not researched that extensively 4. Quality of recycled plastic can be improved significantly by a combination of sorting and contaminant removal; and it seems that even with these actions, it might be cheaper - on the market as it exists now - than virgin plastic production. There's a paper by McKinsey on this matter: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/beyond-the-bottle-solutions-for-recycling-challenging-plastics https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/b...
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
- another2another 2y ago
  >yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. I would say that should make plastic recyclers a fair target for government subsidies since they're not making a financial profit, but are a net social benefit.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Synthetic fuels are a killer app. Especially for transport and home heating (where we have storage and delivery infrastructure nicely worked out). Like you say, price is an issue, but we could opt into it as a society by restricting use of extracted hydrocarbons.
dools 2y ago
"Savor's 'butter' is easily produced and scalable, but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future." Really? Margarine has always been pretty popular, surely this is not dissimilar.
- moltar 2y ago
  It wasn’t always popular. In fact it took tremendous effort of public deception, corruption and lobbying to make margarine a staple today. But I’m sure Gates has pockets deep enough to repeat that.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    The same could be said about the meat and dairy industry and various other foods. But what’s the problem with this CO2 butter? Just more fear of novel foods like the comment above predicted?
    - moltar 2y ago
      Could’ve said the same thing about margarine. It’s made from vegetable oil, which is made from vegetables after all. What could go wrong?
  - soco 2y ago
    Nice story but if anything, it was the other way around: "By the late-19th century, some 37 companies were manufacturing margarine in the US, in opposition to the butter industry, which protested and lobbied for government intervention, eventually leading to the 1886 Margarine Act imposing punitive fees against margarine manufacturers." (Wikipedia)
    - moltar 2y ago
      That’s the original margarine that was actually made from decent ingredients like beef tallow. No one knows this nor refers to that as margarine in the current age. The margarine as we know it today was invented later, in the 20th century and was made from vegetable oils. It was full of trans fats and was a major contributor to heart disease and obesity.
feverzsj 2y ago
Guess people can actually get fat via breathing and drinking water now.
berryg 2y ago
I always mention Solar Foods in Finland, https://solarfoods.com/science/ https://solarfoods.com/science/. Their first factory is operational.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  This is amazing - is there a catch? What's up with the "Finnish investors only" rule?
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Some countries have mechanisms to allow restricted investment by, essentially, retail investors, without being a full public company. These are usually idiosyncratic enough that they're country-scoped and not open to foreign investors. The company does have at least some non-retail foreign investment.
  - m0llusk 2y ago
    Seriously anxious investors can usually set up a local operation to channel funds and build networks.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  This just sounds like a different version of mycoprotein or quorn. Not to discount their efforts, the more like them the better.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ricardobayes 2y ago
We are probably a few cycles away from returning to cook with lard. I still remember that home cooking taste from my grandma's time, which is just impossible to replicate with current cooking techniques.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  Even better beef dripping. Dripping on toast - lovely.
cosmin800 2y ago
Man made horrors beyond comprehension. Leaded gasoline, asbestos, transfats, seed oils, sugar, hfcs, tobbacco, alcohol - all good in moderation.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  When is leaded gasoline good in any volume? I would also ask that about hfcs - I am in the UK so we don't get very much of this at all, surely pure sugar is better all round. Tobacco is also doubtful.
wheybags 2y ago
If you're going to pull hydrocarbons out of air, isn't it more useful to make fuel for engines / heating? Genuine question, as I'm not very familiar with this tech.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  Yeah, or at least sugar? Why fat? That's strange.
- geor9e 2y ago
  So how it works is they have specially bred or engineered microorganisms (usually bacteria, yeast, or algae) in fermentation vats. There's been a lot of these startups, going back 10-20 years at least. They can get sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils, or even hormones like insulin, depending on the gene expression. Many have been focused on biofuels for engines and heating. This startup is hydrogenating the oil into margarine. Technically they pull carbon from the air, and hydrogen can be sourced either from water or fossil fuels. It takes a lot of energy to make that into hydrocarbons.
Laaas 2y ago
Butter isn’t just hydrocarbons though. An imitation that is literally only hydrocarbons would be unhealthy.
thoronton 2y ago
[dead]
nojvek 2y ago
Fun fact: Trees are solar-powered self-replicating 3D-printing machines that use C02 & H2O as building materials. I hope we crack that technology in our lifetime to print our own designs.
Protostome 2y ago
It's hydrogenated fats, aka margerine. Not butter.
linksnapzz 2y ago
Fischer-Tropsch/Karrick process...margarine. Oh, yeah...the ppl who are against transfats will totally go for this. Extra points for using shale oil as a feedstock.
vcxbx 2y ago
[flagged]

44 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

No details of the nutrition facts on the company’s website. Like with all the details of the fat-soluble vitamins and the fatty acids profile. Anyone has a link?

isaacfrond 2y ago

I guess the price of the CO2 butter is vastly higher than that of real butter. So this is probably not going to fly. But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center. Seeing stuff that you can actually do with captured CO2 is surely helpful. I saw the same problem with recycled plastic. We had large plastic recycling plant here. It basically got its raw material free, yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change.

dnpls 2y ago
"The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor’s become affordable to the masses – either the same cost as animal fats or less," Gates wrote. "Savor has a good chance of success here, because the key steps of their fat-production process already work in other industries." So it seems they're onto the price problem already. If they can bring the price down fast enough, maybe there's a chance for this product.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- londons_explore 2y ago
  They might have a chance too. There are plenty of ways of making edible fats from crude oil, but it is generally not allowed by governments (hard to make it pure enough to be safe, protectionism by the food industry). However, CO2 derived fats are much harder to argue against. That makes this one of the places where something that makes little thermodynamic sense might actually make financial sense nonetheless.
adrianN 2y ago
The most profitable thing you can do with captured carbon is probably either burning it or turning it into plastic. The problem is that it is orders of magnitude cheaper to pump carbon from the ground instead of capturing it from the air. The second problem is that burning the captured carbon is forbidden if you want to use carbon capture to reverse global warming.
poulpy123 2y ago
I would say the issue is more it's not a real butter, because it could be sold cheap as a byproduct of the process
az09mugen 2y ago
I don't know how it's working, but I imagine a "killer app" could be in space stations by capturing CO2 emitted by astronauts and produce stuff.
- adwn 2y ago
  > in space stations by capturing CO2 emitted by astronauts and produce stuff You mean all ten of them? https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/ https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/
  - az09mugen 2y ago
    Thanks for that link ^^ I looked a little bit into the numbers [0] and mostly [1], and it's something around 1 kg of CO2/day/person. According to the guardian [2], with water, electricity, ammonia, nutrients and 2 kgs of CO2, you can make 1 kg of some kind of food replacing the meat. I don't say it's easy to do but maybe it's worth exploring to lower the quantity of food astronauts need to bring with them to space. [0] : https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-much-will-be-the-human-breathing-CO2-emission-factor https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-much-will-be-the-human... [1] : https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/how-much-co2-do-humans-produce/ https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/how-much-co... [2] : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/05/carbon-dioxide-co2-capture-utilisation-products-vodka-jet-fuel-protein https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/05/carbon-d...
setopt 2y ago
This strategy is called CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage), as opposed to CCS (without the U). As someone who as previously worked in the field, I think it’s a bad idea. Carbon capture is expensive. Even if you capture at concentrated point sources like power plants or factories, and capture only between 80-95% of the emitted CO2, it’s still quite expensive (e.g. natural gas power can be roughly 25% more expensive when you add carbon capture), and it’s already hard enough to build the capture capacity that we would need to make an impact on global warming. The goal of paying for all that should be to remove those emissions from the world, whereas most utilization processes end up with some or all of that CO2 in the atmosphere in the end. In which case you have wasted energy and money while not saving the environment.
- segfaltnh 2y ago
  Yes but if you generate food from plant emissions that reduces demand for livestock, the net production of CO2 drops, in theory. Your concerns make a ton of sense for some CCUS cases though.
  - setopt 2y ago
    Sure – but I’m willing to bet that we can make butter far more efficiently by cutting out CO2 as a middle man, and e.g. utilizing plant waste more directly in a chemical plant. To be clear: I’m not saying that all research on CO2 utilization is wasted. I’m all for e.g. research into CO2 as a heat pump refrigerant, or feeding CO2 from composting into green houses. But the moment you want to use either industrial CO2 or direct air capture for something else then offsetting global warming, then I think it’s a bad idea.
    - segfaltnh 2y ago
      Interesting, thanks for clarifying. I'm inclined to agree, though I think the world has a place for both types of technology.
ricardobayes 2y ago
It can still work in developing countries where the cost of switching is lower due to the "newer" things not being present yet. Think of fiber lines being laid out first in some areas, so they have a better connectivity than some first-world places. Same with payment systems. China and India are arguably a lot better with payments because they simply skipped the credit card phase. You can literally pay a street vendor in India through a QR code.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > China and India are arguably a lot better with payments because they simply skipped the credit card phase. You can literally pay a street vendor in India through a QR code. I'm not sure I'd say they're "a lot better". Better than the ridiculous US signing a paper bill, yes, but the US is not the standard, they're decades behind it. They use paper cheques ffs! In most of the EU contactless payments that work by card or phone over NFC with well supported/integrated app that work all the same regardless of your bank or exact method of payment sounds much better to me than needing a separate app for the payment provider in question, having to open it to scan a QR code. My current payment flow is I take out my phone, unlock it, tap; or if I don't have my phone / battery is dead, I take out my card, tap it. Having to have a phone, unlock, open a specific app, scan a QR code (muck with light, angle, focus, etc.) and then fill payment details sounds much worse UX.
  - ricardobayes 2y ago
    I wasn't necessarily talking about the US, although I see how you can come to that conclusion. I'm more talking about some other, very developed countries like Germany, in which most vendors don't even accept "normal" debit/credit cards. It's mostly cash only, or a "girocard" which is a German domestic card type. In other countries, I agree that NFC payments made it simpler, although moving money between B2C users is still a bit lacking.
  - olalonde 2y ago
    Still can't do peer to peer pay transfers, still need a bank account, still need to apply for a physical card, still need to pay high transaction fees, still need to fill out credit card information when shopping online, no way to list who is authorized to charge your card and revoke their access, still need a costly terminal to accept payments, etc. Having used both systems, I'd say WeChat and Alipay's payment systems are vastly superior to credit cards in terms of UX.
sofixa 2y ago
> But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center If you discount all externalities that is. Same as cleaning being a "cost centre", until you think what happens if nobody is there to clean, trash piles up, etc.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  True, but with cleaning you see the price of not doing it very quickly. With carbon capture, not so much.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    I mean it's not quick, but everyone not brain dead can see weather getting more extreme and more unpredictable. And when you have basically scientific consensus that it's only going to get worse... it's pretty obvious what the ramifications will be. It's hard to estimate the costs, but massive would be an understatement.
rsynnott 2y ago
Renewable energy, and particularly _wind_ energy, pose a weird new economic question; what if energy is sometimes free (or indeed has a small negative cost; it's generally cheaper to overproduce than to halt the turbines, if you can sink the overproduction somewhere), but you can't control when that happens, or even predict with high accuracy when that happens? We can expect to see a lot more things trying to answer that question.
einpoklum 2y ago
> yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change. Well, about that example: 1. Obligatory first point: This is an example of a systematic problem of capitalism, which by default promotes (corporate) profit seeking over other considerations and interests, making it difficult to achieve them. 2. The state could have, theoretically, taxed the purchase of new plastic products, and/or given tax benefits for switching from new-plastic to recycled-plastic, reversing the "cheaper" incentive. 3. There are uses of recycled plastic where new plastic is just, well, just note used (probably because it provides no benefit). Example: Bricks for the construction industry: https://plaex.ca/about-plaex-building-systems-mortarless-interlocking-construction-blocks-1 https://plaex.ca/about-plaex-building-systems-mortarless-int... caveat: Have not researched that extensively 4. Quality of recycled plastic can be improved significantly by a combination of sorting and contaminant removal; and it seems that even with these actions, it might be cheaper - on the market as it exists now - than virgin plastic production. There's a paper by McKinsey on this matter: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/beyond-the-bottle-solutions-for-recycling-challenging-plastics https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/b...
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
another2another 2y ago
>yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. I would say that should make plastic recyclers a fair target for government subsidies since they're not making a financial profit, but are a net social benefit.
maxerickson 2y ago
Synthetic fuels are a killer app. Especially for transport and home heating (where we have storage and delivery infrastructure nicely worked out). Like you say, price is an issue, but we could opt into it as a society by restricting use of extracted hydrocarbons.

dools 2y ago

"Savor's 'butter' is easily produced and scalable, but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future." Really? Margarine has always been pretty popular, surely this is not dissimilar.

moltar 2y ago
It wasn’t always popular. In fact it took tremendous effort of public deception, corruption and lobbying to make margarine a staple today. But I’m sure Gates has pockets deep enough to repeat that.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  The same could be said about the meat and dairy industry and various other foods. But what’s the problem with this CO2 butter? Just more fear of novel foods like the comment above predicted?
  - moltar 2y ago
    Could’ve said the same thing about margarine. It’s made from vegetable oil, which is made from vegetables after all. What could go wrong?
- soco 2y ago
  Nice story but if anything, it was the other way around: "By the late-19th century, some 37 companies were manufacturing margarine in the US, in opposition to the butter industry, which protested and lobbied for government intervention, eventually leading to the 1886 Margarine Act imposing punitive fees against margarine manufacturers." (Wikipedia)
  - moltar 2y ago
    That’s the original margarine that was actually made from decent ingredients like beef tallow. No one knows this nor refers to that as margarine in the current age. The margarine as we know it today was invented later, in the 20th century and was made from vegetable oils. It was full of trans fats and was a major contributor to heart disease and obesity.

feverzsj 2y ago

Guess people can actually get fat via breathing and drinking water now.

berryg 2y ago

I always mention Solar Foods in Finland, https://solarfoods.com/science/ https://solarfoods.com/science/. Their first factory is operational.

actionfromafar 2y ago
This is amazing - is there a catch? What's up with the "Finnish investors only" rule?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Some countries have mechanisms to allow restricted investment by, essentially, retail investors, without being a full public company. These are usually idiosyncratic enough that they're country-scoped and not open to foreign investors. The company does have at least some non-retail foreign investment.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  Seriously anxious investors can usually set up a local operation to channel funds and build networks.
KoolKat23 2y ago
This just sounds like a different version of mycoprotein or quorn. Not to discount their efforts, the more like them the better.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ricardobayes 2y ago

We are probably a few cycles away from returning to cook with lard. I still remember that home cooking taste from my grandma's time, which is just impossible to replicate with current cooking techniques.

pasc1878 2y ago
Even better beef dripping. Dripping on toast - lovely.

cosmin800 2y ago

Man made horrors beyond comprehension. Leaded gasoline, asbestos, transfats, seed oils, sugar, hfcs, tobbacco, alcohol - all good in moderation.

pasc1878 2y ago
When is leaded gasoline good in any volume? I would also ask that about hfcs - I am in the UK so we don't get very much of this at all, surely pure sugar is better all round. Tobacco is also doubtful.

wheybags 2y ago

If you're going to pull hydrocarbons out of air, isn't it more useful to make fuel for engines / heating? Genuine question, as I'm not very familiar with this tech.

guerrilla 2y ago
Yeah, or at least sugar? Why fat? That's strange.
geor9e 2y ago
So how it works is they have specially bred or engineered microorganisms (usually bacteria, yeast, or algae) in fermentation vats. There's been a lot of these startups, going back 10-20 years at least. They can get sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils, or even hormones like insulin, depending on the gene expression. Many have been focused on biofuels for engines and heating. This startup is hydrogenating the oil into margarine. Technically they pull carbon from the air, and hydrogen can be sourced either from water or fossil fuels. It takes a lot of energy to make that into hydrocarbons.

Laaas 2y ago

Butter isn’t just hydrocarbons though. An imitation that is literally only hydrocarbons would be unhealthy.

thoronton 2y ago

[dead]

nojvek 2y ago

Fun fact: Trees are solar-powered self-replicating 3D-printing machines that use C02 & H2O as building materials. I hope we crack that technology in our lifetime to print our own designs.

Protostome 2y ago

It's hydrogenated fats, aka margerine. Not butter.

linksnapzz 2y ago

Fischer-Tropsch/Karrick process...margarine. Oh, yeah...the ppl who are against transfats will totally go for this. Extra points for using shale oil as a feedstock.

vcxbx 2y ago

[flagged]