Bill Gates-backed startup makes ‘butter’ out of water and carbon dioxide
Bill Gates-backed startup makes ‘butter’ out of water and carbon dioxide
To make this alternative butter, you don't need land, livestock, or crops.
A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
My thought was "I doubt you can make fat only with hydrogen and carbon", but fats/lipids are literally hydrocarbons. Adding other elements changes the taste, so it isn't necessary to have mammals anywhere in the production chain.
Very interesting and probably not the first time this is/has been done. It seems quite obvious.
The biggest question which is barely alluded to in the article is cost. If it can't compete with mass produced butter at cost and scale then it'll just be another "alternative" which is good but not as big.
They also mention that they compared emissions and land use but give no aspect of what synthetic processes are used (I'd assume they at least have provisional patents on the "how to" already).
During WW2, due to the food shortage, Germans did this using the carbon from coal... The process is old and known.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
Let's see if the process can be made more efficient this time. Allegedly, the product was virtually indistinguishable from butter.
Computer! Butter! Room temp!
Fat and oil production from animal and plant-based sources are collectively responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2
You cannot be serious that animal-based and plant-based are grouped in this figure. Plant-based is likely close to carbon-neutral, and only not net-negative, because of transport, cooling etc., which will also be necessary for this artificially created fat...
If this were to take off France and the US South by themselves could eat us out of climate change in a matter of months
If it tastes and spreads like a tub of Land o Lakes then I'll probably try it. I don't care where the hell it comes from as long as it tastes correct.
I wonder if they can use CO2 that comes from industrial carbon capture, or if it needs to be something purer that takes a lot of energy to produce.
Also, I'm not sure if we can get industrial volumes of hydrogen from sources other than fossil fuels now. Its been a while, but last I checked it was coming from things like byproducts from reformers.
The problem with making carbon into butter is it will just be released once someone eats it and burns off the calories. BUT, I think you can make soap from just about any oil. So you could turn carbon from the air into fake butter, turn that fake butter into soap, and then store the soap in caves, solving any potential soap shortages for the next several millennia while also solving the climate crisis.
Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"
I mean cool, but if farts release CO2 after digestion breaks down fats and proteins, then it's not much of a carbon sink, is it? Not to mention the scale necessary to reverse climate change. We'd have to make billions of barrels of the stuff, then pump it deep underground for long term sequestration. It'll be so energy intensive we'll require nuclear fusion.
Dead serious, I say we do it.
I'm not hungry.
so what i don't get is how any margarine could have the same flavour as butter without adding in some sort of protein and presumably a bit of sweetener, considering that butter is fat/milk protein/milk sugar (lactose)..
You can obviously get close enough (i mostly eat margarine), the non-fat content of butter is very small after all, but still surely you have to add those things to get that extra kick of flavour that butter has?
The largest (farm) landowner in the US is backing a venture that does not require land?
Looks like saturated fat. Don't eat it. Queue ketobro pseudoscience.
Multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios of total and cardiometabolic mortality for 1-tablespoon/day increment in cooking oil/fat consumption. Forest plots show the multivariable HRs of total (a) and cardiometabolic (b) mortality associated with 1-tablespoon/day increment in butter, margarine, corn oil, canola oil, and olive oil consumption. HRs were adjusted for age, sex, BMI, race, education, marital status, household income, smoking, alcohol, vigorous physical activity, usual activity at work, perceived health condition, history of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer at baseline, Healthy Eating Index-2015, total energy intake, and consumption of remaining oils where appropriate (butter, margarine, lard, corn oil, canola oil, olive oil, and other vegetable oils). Horizontal lines represent 95% CIs
Cooking oil/fat consumption and deaths from cardiometabolic diseases and other causes: prospective analysis of 521,120 individuals https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-021-01961-2/figures/1
