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Comment by tobiasSoftware | Hacker News Reader

"According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry."

I came away with the opposite understanding. I don't understand why lower cost lab grown meat would be fundamentally impossible. At its theoretical best, lab grown meat takes the existing non-lab grown situation and improves on it in two very important ways - less energy wasted growing non-meat, and less land required due to vertical farming capabilities. Rather, the issues I saw that the article talks about, such as issues maintaining sterile environments, aren't things that are theoretical limits, but are practical problems that might or might not have an eventual answer.

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According to the article there are no economics of scale. A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run. This is apparently a very difficult problem: "But the truth is this: For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years."

> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.

This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain. No economics of scale just means that you can't get much better than linear, but in nearly all cases you at least get linear scaling.

That is assuming that there is an elastic supply of needed materials. There may be bottlenecks in supplies that drive costs up.

Is it easier to keep a city of 10k or 100k disease free? If both get "contaminated", which is the bigger cost?

That's a false analogy. 10 separate factories in their example would be 10 separate cities each with 10k people, not 1 large city with 100k people.

That's not how you reach economies of scale.

We all know that. Their point was that you get linear scaling using that approach, which disproves the notion that you can't get linear scaling.

Linear scaling of any project large enough to disrupt an industry (as is being suggested here) is a pipe dream.

When you are trying to scale up something that big, you eventually get beyond economies of scale for the required infrastructure and feedstock, and as a result, increase overall demand, which raises prices.

You only get near-linear scaling for a very short, initial "ramp-up" period.

Beyond that, you start cornering markets, which makes prices spike, not decrease or even hold steady.

>> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.

> This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain.

No it isn't. Your "solution" is a different thing. A collection of smaller facilities is not the same thing as a larger facility.

You can have a large facility with 10,000 automated lines.

> You can have a large facility with 10,000 automated lines.

Read the article. IIRC, it's talking about the limits of how large you can practically scale a clean room.

Environmentalists often have a bias for small scale operation. They just really like the idea of everyone having their own bioreactor in their closet powered by their own rooftop solar panels. I think it may be simply an aesthetic preference that they then try to rationalize, facts be damned.

It depends, if they share some facilities with other functions that pay parts of the bills then those parts wont scale up. Like lets say you rent out part of your capacity to a nearby lab that pay research lab money for it, that could cover most of their expenses for a small facility. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how they are running things right now.

The article says you need 40 000 of these to replace our meat consumption:

> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.

You know what the total value of the entire worlds meat industry is today? Less than a trillion. So if we could run those labs for free, it would only take a bit over 80 000 years to for them to pay off. But of course they can't run for that long and they need manpower etc. Now if we mass produce those labs it might become cheaper, but will it really get ten thousand times cheaper?

Now, you could say that costs go down with scale. But we also know that projected costs of large projects rarely stay that low, likely those facilities would cost way more than that at first. And price would have to go down really quickly, as just building the first 10 would cost the equivalent of 20 year of meat production.

Correcting my comment here, the article apparently have a huge error: The 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility.. The article says this:

> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.

> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.

However, the link it is refering says this:

> According to CE Delft's techno-economic analysis, each factory could cost around $450m. A quick calculation suggests 4000 factories at this price would cost an eye-watering $1.8trn.

So the 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility. At that cost the investment to replace the worlds meat production would be worth 20 years of traditional meat farming, and then running cost above that. Significant but not unsurmountable as the article wanted to claim.

Your proposal only works if the production equipment will have a greater than 20-year life. All available evidence says it wont, so the ROI is not 20 years, but practically infinite — and hence insurmountable.

for perspective thats 500B less than war in Afghanistan.

There is the relatively free transformation of solar energy into meat when done naturally. Lab grown meat would seem to require a lot more process to turn that free solar energy into a consumable product.

For certain definitions of "free" and "naturally". But certainly not free of side effects on the environment: land and water use with deforestation and water crises, pesticide runoff, pesticide resistance, increased transportation costs and pollution for supplies and feed, increased transfer of disease (swine flu), increased CO2 and methane production. And also increased animal suffering.

those are process problems that already have solutions (which reduce profit somewhat). the biotech process has a bunch of unsolved scale problems, will likely have it's own externalities, and cost significantly more.

I agree that the likely result is that lab-grown meat will most likely cost more. I'm just not sure that not-lab-grown meat will stay cheap. The unseen environmental costs of raising livestock are not currently well-represented in its price, which is also heavily subsidized (both financial subsidies and unhandled environmental externalities). And there's not enough land in the US to put all of its livestock to graze. There's water supply problems for livestock and feed (which takes 10x resources to grow compared to simply growing plants). So if, on top of that, you introduce mitigations that reduce profit somewhat, the price will have to go up even more.

Factory farms are also currently benefitting from economies of scale, something that plant-based meat manufacturers are only now catching up to. Plant-based meat's ingredients are generally pretty cheap compared to the cost of raising livestock, so theoretically they could potentially beat the cost of meat.

My non-expert hunch is that its externalities of lab-grown meat will be somewhat different from factory farms. Time will tell if they're better, more sustainable trade-offs.

Regenerative agriculture uses livestock to increase viability of soil. If used correctly theyre already a sustainable ag tool that uses waste and grazing as a benefit to plant production and carbon sequestration, not just a meat generation source. Lab meat will become less efficient at high scale not more efficient according to the history of previous biotech scale up attempts, most of which use more viable organisms than animal cell culture.

I'm thinking of the solar panels and batteries that would be needed and the environmental costs tied to creating them. They may be better allocated to replacing other sources of energy consumption in the near term.

If we can assume that the meat labs could overcome all their serious challenges if only we tried hard enough, ISTM certain problems related to traditional livestock agriculture could also be solved with some effort. Vote with your meat-purchasing dollars!

My main reason for staying with meat is that we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives. There is a very complex biological process in nutrition that we probably don't understand barely at all.

> we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives

Can I ask if you avoid soda, beer, cheese, every vegetable oil, artificial sweeteners, cookies, pastries, cake, pasta, and so on? Many plant based meats come from protein extracted from peas, wheat, soy, plus some oil, binders (that generally are also used in non-plant-based foods), and seasonings.

Do you avoid soy- and wheat-fed meat? Doesn't that affect the nutrition of the meat, since the animal had not evolved to survive on this diet?

Which ungulates have such delicate constitutions that they can't eat soy or wheat or (what they actually eat) corn?

I didn't say they can't eat it - obviously they can. The post I replied to specifically called out that they were sticking with meat because humans hadn't evolved to eat plant-based or lab-grown meat, and then implied their nutrition would suffer if they gave up meat. If that's correct, it must also then affect livestock's nutrition, since they didn't evolve to eat a soy/wheat or, as you correctly call out, corn diet. So I asked if they avoid meat fed on this "not evolved to eat" diet as well.

Certainly their outcome does change based on diet. You can compare corn fed, grass fed - corn finished, grass fed and finished, and wild game.

In all cases, there are nutrients and proteins that you cannot find in plant based alternatives. If you are vegetarian or stronger, you have to supplement with pills to get the things that are not in your diet. It is unclear whether lab-grown will lack nutrients found in natural meat, or if artificial supplementation is really equivalent.

Hence the desire to stay close to our evolutionary roots. Same idea as walking a lot and squatting to duce.

Can we assume that? And if we can, can we assume that the kinds of problems lab-grown meat has are the same problems as factory farms?

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