A company in Batavia, Illinois is making butter in a way you've never seen before. No animals, no plants, no oils; this butter is made from carbon.

A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world’s first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.

The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
    6·
    10 days ago

    This isn’t new technology. This is the Fischer-Tropsch process, which cracks and/or lengthens hydrocarbon chains to produce molecules of the specifically desired length. The Germans used this same process almost a century ago. They cracked coal to produce lighter chemicals (primarily methane) then re-lengthened those methane chains to produce a variety of products, ranging from fuels, lubricants, and yes: edible “butter”.

    This article repackages the same technology the Nazis used to feed their U-boat crews in WWII.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      01·
      10 days ago

      You frame it like it’s a bad thing but even if the process is mostly the same isn’t that good? Also we can clearly improve on a 100 year old technology even if it’s “solved”.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        My primary issue is that the entire article is somewhat deceitful. They use phrases like “never seen before”, “unprecedented”, “pioneering”, but those characteristics do not really apply to the +90-year-old technology. The only significant part of the “process” that is different from what was uses in WWII is the specific flavor packs they add to the product.

        Their deceitful comments about the technology have me questioning the veracity of the rest of their claims.

        Don’t get me wrong: I think that Fischer-Tropsch is one of a few important technologies we need to be adopting. The reason we need to adopt it is because it is incredibly energy intensive, but not necessarily time critical. It can provide a profitable sink for excess solar energy production during long summer days, to produce hydrocarbon fuels for the transportation and aviation industries, yet switch offline overnight, overwinter, and during inclement weather, when solar can’t meet demand.

        But we just don’t consume enough butter for this application to be useful to solar generation.

        The Air Force experimented with Fischer-Tropsch “SynFuels” about 15 years ago. They actually certified most/all military aircraft to burn SynFuels, to lessen our military’s reliance on foreign oil.