- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
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”.
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.
If it’s not dairy, is this not margarine rather than butter?
Also, a
proprietary process
Ugh, capitalism
I mean, it was backed by Bill Gates, mr proprietary himself
Gates
just like he did the vaccines/.(not for himself but for the pharma companies.)
The basic process is not proprietary. It’s just the Fischer-Tropsch process. It’s been in use since WWII. It produces hydrocarbon chains of arbitrary length from whatever hydrocarbon feedstock you can provide.
Dietary fats are just certain short-chained hydrocarbons accompanied by certain flavorful compounds.
The “proprietary” part is what chemicals they add to the synthesized fat to make it sufficiently comparable to butter.
The Nazis used the same basic process to produce “butter” from coal feedstocks about 90 years ago. This is nothing new.
but also we already have margarine that tastes close enough to butter, so this thing is at best “hey guys we made margerine taste slightly more like butter”
the brand i’ve used which is very butter-like just adds some sort of field bean extract and some orange food colouring lmao
That is absolutely wild…
Don’t say the m-word, it makes milk boys nervous
Yes, this has nothing to do with butter.
It is neither plant or animal based, the chemical composition is claimed to be like butter, so it is even less margarine than it is butter. Margarine is hardened plant oil or technically it can also be made from animal fat. So this is neither margarine or butter, it is synthetic butter, since it synthesized chemically, rather than made by the traditional more natural method.
But yes capitalism indeed. Why try to help the world if you can’t make money on it? 🙄
…carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen…
Pretty sure that is what regular butter is made out of too.
Yes, they aren’t trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They’re trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.
This isn’t butter, this is one type of butter fat. It’s missing the milk solids, proteins, and other molecules that contribute to butter’s smell and taste.
I shall add some potassium and market it as buttOCK
I bet that price is the main issue. The reason all of these startups fall into oblivion is that price is astronomical.
but also in this case we already have perfectly fucking fine margerine, if you splurge on slightly more expensive (which is still like half the fucking price of butter) stuff it’ll taste pretty damn close to butter so long as you’re not doing a side by side comparison.
“Tastes just like the real thing” is a sure sign that it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the real thing
I’m watching you, Dent
That’s what I’m thinking. For example, there are milk proteins in butter that undergo the Maillard reaction to produce different flavors. Will this product have the same proteins?
Once we kill the Earth, this will be how food is manufactured. I am now going to finish my box of Soylent Green.
I’m not sure why people are so puritanical about this. I think Beyond Burgers and Soylent are great.
Had a Beyond burger once. Once. I can’t put it words what I didn’t like, but it was revolting.
I like Beyond Burger more than hamburger but not more than black bean burgers or ground pork. I just dislike ground beef though. That Beyond Burger is made from isolated pea protein, flavoring and wishes. It does have a distinct flavor, and is a highly processed food.
In case you don’t know, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Soylent very much had that in mind when naming their product. It’s meant to serve the same purpose as the titular substance: a wholly complete food source. Also constantly referencing Soylent Green to denigrate Soylent was precisely what I was referring to lol
Yeah but you referenced Soylent when the original comment was about Soylent Green (which, as you tacitly acknowledge, came first) so you kind of got the cause and effect backwards
well he’s not arguing against eating people, he’s arguing against a distate for the concept of food replacements. not every post-apocalyptic replacement has to be made from people either
I don’t think the person at the beginning of the thread was saying all food would be made from people. I think they were referencing a fictional product for irony and that the person who responded didn’t catch, and the responding person said what they said to follow up and anyone with the will to read can interpret for themselves…
Enjoy your heavily processed food full of saturated fat and more than 4x the sodium of beef burgers.
And a touch of GMO goodness with your soylent.Brother do you know what a GMO is?
Do you know what obvious sarcasm is?
Do you? Because you sound like some of the arguments I’ve heard from conservatives/cowbrains when I’ve talked about not eating meat and trying substitutes.
Like it would take very little effort to make this sound like part of an Alex Jones rant, talk about the nutrition aspect and transition into a lazy ad pivot and you’re basically there.
TF are you going on about conservatives, Alex Jones and whatever?
That’s some rambling associated with inhabitants of the US banana republic and their fanatic fixation on making everything about them and their 2 sides of the Uniparty.
“Someone in the world doesn’t like GMO’s, that’s also side B’s stance and automatically bad!”
“What, Side B says the sun comes up in the east? If they say it it must be in the west!”Simplistic ridiculous campist thinking.
Really I hope both of your camps burn that joke of a country to the ground and disappear.
Bye now
Not that obvious, it seems
I assumed “GMO goodness” was more than low bar enough.
How on earth is he going to process the scientific explanation in the article?sukhmel probably assumed you meant that you were parodying someone who hates artificial foods and GMOs and did not actually hate them yourself
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
What is wrong with entertainment, though? Taste is one of our senses, like hearing or seeing, having food that tastes good is not inefficient , it’s lovely - I think having a good palate and appreciation for lots of flavors is a positive good in a life.
That’s a very shallow take. Food taste good thus must be good? You do not dare to explore this any deeper?
? I grow vegetables and fruit, make healthy meals, mostly homemade. Sourdough bread, fermented drinks with odds and ends to divert waste. Why do people think good food doesn’t taste good? Good food tastes great.
No one’s argueing that food doesn’t taste good but there’s more to food than just taste and kinda sad that you don’t see it.
I am so confused. Why do you think I said taste is the only thing that matters about food? I did not say that. I said that it does matter, and should not be devalued, would never argue that it’s the only thing that matters, and never said that.
I think you genuinely have a reading comprehension disability.
Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.
and you reply with “but food tastes good” — duuuuuh but why would that matter to anything? like seriously dude, spend some time with yourself.
The animals we create are morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. It harms us when we take pleasure in cruelty and violence. Need additional reasons why sensory enjoyment must not be the primary criteria?
Why are you conflating animal foods and pleasure in eating? My vegan kid is a foodie, a good cook and a person who gets a lot of sensory enjoyment out of the texture and flavors of food. It’s important to her.
I don’t think drmoose would consider non–animal-based food entertainment as inefficient as e.g. butter
How is this not just crisco, hydrogenated fat? Butter seems like it has more going on, traces of milk proteins & sugars that give it flavor.
Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).
This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.
Whilst yes, uplifting, I also have a certain inherent skepticism to artificial facsimiles. Too often it’s an unwelcome discovery.
For instance about a year ago we found a new product in the cheese aisle, slightly cheaper than regular gouda and called “gaudina” - turns out, not actually cheese but instead made from milk powder, palm oil and other assorted stuff.
Until somebody proves through proper trials and reviews that the products have no statistically significant difference in health outcomes, I’ll be hesitant.
So, it’s probably more healthy then, with unsaturated fatty acids?
“Other assorted stuff”? The palm oil probably isn’t great, of course it’s simple existence is causing the intentional destruction of important forests and it, and the people who use it, can fuck right off, but otherwise I dunno, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world.
I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho
I’m curious about the nutritious value and in particular the cholesterol levels of this product. I suppose since it is indistinguishable from butter, it should be the same. Margarine 2.0
Margarine?
I would like to see the LCA analysis on this one. I would not be surprised if this ends up using energy causing more damage than the damage that dairy farming methane and land conversion is doing.
I’d be very impressed if this somehow created more methane than cow farts.
Why is this uplifting news?
It could eliminate billions of animal deaths.
Sound like coal butter, which existed in WW2 but was discontinued because of inefficiency.
And the most important question: how does it taste?
No the most important question is how much energy does it take?
[…] they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, […]
So direct air capture, instead of industrial waste CO2, good luck with that.
No the most important question is how much energy does it take?
It takes a lot, but not nearly enough.
The real problem with solar generation is seasonal variation. Think about the generation capacity we need during a 9-hour, overcast, winter day. Now, think about that same array under clear summer skies, when we are getting 15 hours of daylight.
It’s barely meeting demamd in winter, but it is producing 4-10 times as much power as we actually need in summer. Grid storage is the usual suggestion for mitigating the limitations of solar generation, but no amount of grid storage is feasible for leveling seasonal variations.
Energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch technology could soak up that excess summer power production, and shit off for the winter, making it profitable to deploy those large solar arrays. But we don’t consume nearly enough butter to make this a viable approach at mitigating seasonal variation. To make it useful for promoting solar rollouts, we would need to be producing jet fuel, not butter.
If capitalism has taught me anything, it’s that it won’t be used like this. There is only one way the producers of this butter would tie production to excess solar capacity, and that is if it’s the most profitable. That would require that the cost of solar + storage + transport is cheaper than using another source of energy, on demand. And that’s even assuming there’s enough excess solar to run the whole thing, and the logistics don’t get in the way of maintaining the supply chain.
There is only one way the producers of this butter would tie production to excess solar capacity
The Fischer-Tropsch process can be uses to produce any hydrocarbon product. We don’t use enough butter for it to feasibly soak up excess solar generation in the summer.
But we do use enough jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.
And that’s even assuming there’s enough excess solar to run the whole thing,
Thats not an assumption. That is the specific problem we need to overcome for solar to replace coal and nuclear. Already, we have summer, daytime generation rates going negative because we have not adequately adapted to the seasonal variation in solar. Those negative rates are massively hurting solar rollouts around the world.
We need massive, seasonal electrical loads to make solar profitable during spring/summer/autumn, so that we have sufficient generation capacity available through winter.
Storage is important for matching the daily generation curve to the daily demand curve, but we can’t hope to match seasonal variation. It would be easier to shift power across the equator than to build out enough storage to solve the seasonal variation problem.
The planet can be saved! We just need to eat CO2 HO butter.
I assume we sequester it when we poop? I don’t know what we do with human waste sludge. And I’m not sure I’m brave enough to google for myself.
We have bacteria break it down to create biogas, wich we burn for energy, and sludge wich we burn and put the ashes in landfills or back on the fields as fertilizer.
You can rest assured that all the carbon makes it to the atmosphere, one way or another.anton
On first pass landfill doesn’t sound that bad. But that’s after burning… Alas.
Even if it gets put in s landfill without burning, it will rott and the carbon reaches the atmosphere as CO2 or methane (much worse).
I find myself very curious about the amount of carbon left after burning (presumably the char doesn’t rot so much?). Trying to look it up also turned up this:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/04/11/to-more-effectively-sequester-biomass-and-carbon-just-add-salt/
(Clearly over-optimistic reporting of a researcher; but conceptually satisfying.) Perhaps if we have enough salted butter go to waste…
