Solein – Protein out of thin air
solein.com
solein.com
There is no nitrogen mentioned in this explanation. You cannot make amino acids or proteins without nitrogen. These organism either have to be able to do nitrogen-fixation from the air, which is a really difficult and energy-intensive process or the nitrogen has to come from some growth medium. It certainly doesn't make a good first impression that they "forgot" such an important part in this description.
In general the interesting part of such a scheme is how much energy it uses. Converting CO2 to organic molecules and nitrogen-fixation are very energy-intensive processes, the problem isn't that we can't do this but that the amount of energy is incredibly expensive compared to using photosynthesis in plants.
"It's a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs."
...
"If you close your eyes, it almost feels like you're eating runny eggs."
"Yeah, or a bowl of snot."
The whole motivation of Cypher is because he wants to be plugged back in, and the movie presents it as him being sick and tired and the drab life aboard the ship. But they literally have a VR env that is completely realistic, and can give them any experience they want. The best food, the best entertainment, the "Lady in Red", etc.
I'm not sure if you actually know this, but AFAIK initially the script writers wanted it to be 'the human brain as CPU' but the studio was afraid the general movie populace (back in 1999) wouldn't know what a CPU was and thus wouldn't jive with it.
They have an unsophisticated, binary view of the world (for plot reasons, I guess) while some nuance and tolerance would have had made a more realistic and_human_take on the situation.
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Agent Smith: Then we have a deal?
Cypher: I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important. Like an actor.
Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.
Cypher: Okay. I get my body back into a power plant, re-insert me into the Matrix, I’ll get you what you want.
Cypher didn't just want to eat fake steak, to him that wasn't enough. Ignorance is bliss. He wanted to eat fake steak and not know that it was fake.
It has A, B, C, D... (Without the "and" before D, it is arguable -- especially for those that like clarity of language -- but people do sometimes drop the "and" in casual speech)
Like if a mechanic said "We service Fords, Toyotas, Hondas, all the well known brands" it wouldn't imply that those three were the only major brands.
So, all good in HN land.
Made my day, thanks.
Not sure how this is Nobel Prize worthy. I've grown blue green algae and legumes at home.
“Solar Foods is a Finland-based start-up company that utilises CO2 captured from air, water and some minerals as sole raw materials to produce a protein powder using renewable electricity.
Branded as Solein®, the product is a microbial protein (also referred to as single cell protein, SCP) obtained by growing proprietary bacteria harvested from nature, in specially designed bioreactors using gas fermentation.”
https://ifst.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsat.3...
Not that surprising that you won’t find the word “bacteria” anywhere on a marketing site, but wish they were at least more up front with exactly how their process is “more efficient than plants”.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)
(Patent says it’s a strain of Xanthobacter.)
So which is it, proprietary or natural? You can't own something you didn't create.
Ah Hacker News. Never change.
2) By patenting the industrial process that makes use of the bacteria, thus gaining an exclusive commercial right to it.
Now CA3153196A1 is the interesting one as it names Xanthobacter sp. VTT-E-193585 as the strain of interest. You even get a 16S rRNA sequence with it for doing some taxonomy! This is not to be confused with FI129574B involving a similar but genetically modified bacterium.
Feynman talk on this.[1]
So, with that out of the way, what does this company actually have?
* They have a cool web site with no useful info.
* They have another web site with useful info.[2]
* You can't even order samples of the product.
* They have a useful Wikipedia article.[3]
* It's a fermentation process, so it takes heat and water, not just air.
* They've been around since at least 2019 and have burned through about $20 million in funding.
* None of their PR discusses cost of the product.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/25/161753383/t...
As a ‘hard tech’, they need to work themselves through the technology readiness framework before the cost of a particular material even tells you anything of value.
Most of the high-tech food schemes produce some high-value product. This produces a very low value product. It's Hamburger Helper. Cost dominates.
Also, soybeans need to be shipped from fertile areas. This could be produced in situ in infertile areas.
I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it has some benefits over traditional intensive agriculture.
This seems to be a comprehensive discussion (for South Dakota farmers anyway, pdf):
https://extension.sdstate.edu/sites/default/files/2020-03/S-...
No it's not. This is the kind of thinking that so many new founders screw up with.
The competition is what users are willing to buy instead of you. That's regular soy beans, not whatever market you decide it should be. Don't think this way.
Or a licensing deal with Dolly Parton. It’s right there. The ad makes itself.
https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/files/2019/03/Subsidence.jpg
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
This is so much of a problem that even skeptical industrial farmers are starting to use organic farming techniques (such as compost or nettle manure) to replenish their soils for monoculture. Which is of course not as good as smart permaculture setups, but well.
To be fair, if the heat is from solar or wind energy, and the water is collected from rain (which I guess includes river water?) then those are also "out of thin air".
Or I suppose you could say that air containing rain is not as thin (i.e. contains more mass) than "normal" air, or that "air" only refers to the gases, not the rain falling through it, in which case they'd have to rely on moisture vaporators, like in Star Wars.
Most vegetation is water. Vegetables, at least, are about 90% water. https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/vegetables-high-in-water...
So yeah, except for the water content, most of the molecular weight is atoms that come from air- but the water content is *HUGE*.
Any random tree will have about 50% water and close to that amount in carbon, with trace amounts of other elements. That's less water than you and me.
They're working on getting approval from EU food safety regulators: https://solarfoods.com/solein-submitted-to-the-european-comm...
“HOW SOLEIN IS MADE Solein® is made from natural single-cell organisms, which are grown in a fermentation process. Water is split from the air with renewable electricity into hydrogen and oxygen. The cells are fed CO2 from the air, hydrogen and mineral nutrients.
These microorganisms are then able to make amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), and vitamins. They do the heavy lifting in this process. We are only letting their microscopic lives fulfil their purpose: procreation and diversification.
When it's time to harvest the Solein, the excess water is removed, and then it is finally dried into a fine protein powder, with no plants or animals harmed in the process.”
PS: fulfill (sic)
PS2: I'm sure the similarity of the name with soylent green is not lost on the marketing team, I'm just surprised they found it beneficial.
* Carbohydrates are easy. (It's actually very difficult to "transform" light into sugar, but there are plenty of plants and bacteria that can do that. They are using Hydrogen instead of light, but so let's say it's "easy".)
* Lipids are even easier. (I can't remember any technical problem here.)
* Amino acids are difficult to create out of thin air. You need energy and also a source of Nitrogen. Transforming the Nitrogen of the atmosphere into amino acids is very difficult and only a few specialized microorganism can do that, so color me skeptical. Another possibility is to give feed them with nitrates, that is a very common and important fertilizer for plants. It's necessary a lot of energy to produce nitrates, so it's not an easy step. Perhaps they can hide the nitrates inside the "mineral nutrients" that is technically true, but it's almost cheating.
* Vitamins are probably also difficult. Each vitamin is very different. I doubt they selected one microorganism that can produce all of them, if that really exists. Also you need a lot of some vitamins and very few of other, the amount is also important. So I guess to use this it's necessary to complement it with vitamins from other sources.
Yes, why? That’s the first question.
Remember Soylent, the company and product? They're still around, selling on Amazon.
You had one job...
microbes, bacteria etc are extremely resilient to temporary adversity, when theres a surplus of intermittent energy you can feed them the energy, when there is insufficient energy you can let the cells wait for their next meal.
this also frees up energy otherwise spent on agriculture
EDIT: if the claim is true that SCProtein is end-to-end 20x more efficient than vegetable protein and 200x more efficient than meat protein (implying vegetable protein to be ~10x as efficient as meat protein) then this implies feeding these SCProtein to cattle would result in classic meat but still 2x as efficient as vegetable protein today!
EDIT2: this would result in the following order of footprints of foodstuffs:
* animal meat fed vegetable protein (for the super rich)
* vegetable protein (for the rich)
* animal meat fed solein(for the middle class)
* solein (for the lower class)
The bulk of the population will see an inversion where its more responsible to eat solein-fed animal meat than it is to eat vegetable protein!! This results from the inability / impracticality to feed protein to plants
Another observation, if its 20 times as efficient as growing vegetable protein, then we could easily afford to slash say half of agricultural land, giving enormous areas for solar panels, with about 1 / 2 + 20 x 1 / 2 = 10.5 x as much protein as today.
> feeding these SCProtein to cattle would result in classic meat but still 2x as efficient as vegetable protein today!
Our cultural archetypes are rich, see which you would do for a few days and which you would do daily:
* dawn at a mountain cabin overlooking the town below, no running water [vs] dawn at a modern apartment in a block full of buildings.
* food grown in plants, in fields tended by people and fertilized with manure [vs] food grown in a vat.
* A week hiking [vs] a week going to the gym.
* Being socially approved by one day marrying at a church [vs] living with whoever you fancy every day for the rest of your life.
* Eating cabbage [vs] eating protein dust made with genetically modified bacteria that tastes like chocolate dough.
* Eating genetically modified cabbage that tastes like chocolate dough [vs] eating protein dust made with genetically modified bacteria that tastes like cabbage.
From a skim, the site doesn't actually say what organism they're growing. Why is it more likely to be impactful than others?
We’ve had recombinant stuff since the late-70s and 80s. For example, yeast are used for the production of human insulin among many other compounds.
Is the scale of production any different?
Let's hope we can beat some sense into ourselves before we get there.
1. Lightning strikes ~5% of world supply of nitrogen fertilizer
2 & 3. Synbiotic bacteria + Haber Bosch - the 95%.
https://solarfoods.com/foodfarm/
which is a 404 page not found. I wonder if maybe it should send you to https://solarfoods.com/news-and-blog/ ?
Since then, they've posted this upbeat blog update though: https://solarfoods.com/end-of-the-beginning-how-solar-foods-...
Leave it to one of humanity's oldest food prep techniques: fermentation. Also, not all fermentation requires heat. It certainly will generate heat as it ferments. Perhaps it can be captured and redistributed into its manufacturing.
The questions for me are what the input costs really are (from energy material sourcing all the way to distribution). I've seen a bunch of critiques of cellular ag from the 'regenerative' spaces (which make good arguments around monocrop farming and impacts on rancher livelihoods (particularly those trying to do more indigenous practices)), and also provocations of inquiry such as:
Gabriel Rosenberg: https://bearistotle.substack.com/p/labriculture-now-4f1
Isha Datar: https://mobile.twitter.com/IshaDatar/status/1441070303786913...
so..... instead of "wasting" time in spending water and soil and fertilizer into making plants that use solar energy to create "food", we skip that step and just use electricity that is generated from solar energy and make protein out of it..... law of thermodynamics say matter can neither be created nor destroyed so unless this is reducing inefficiencies of the existing plant model, isnt it 1 unit of electricty=1 unit of protein?
or are they aiming for heatpump style efficiencies? 5:1??
The intuition behind cultivating hydrogen oxidizing bacteria for single cell protein is that the coupled efficiency of solar photovoltaics plus electrolyzers can be an order of magnitude more productive per hectare for sunlight-to-protein than growing crops in fields. It doesn't require irrigation, weed control, pest control, tilling, or harvesters. It can use land that is too dry, rocky, hot, cold, or contaminated to grow crops. It's still an open question whether the output protein can be of a quality and price that it will out-compete e.g. conventionally grown soybeans, because despite all these advantages it is also much more capital intensive than growing beans.
I recently wrote a longer comment about hydrogen oxidizing bacteria as protein source that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288926
[1] from e.g. Longi https://cdn.enfsolar.com/z/pp/t8gzz7lxx769/L-Gi-LE-T-TMD-059...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-kWh-of-electricity-is-needed-...
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/fes3.348
But what's the efficiency of converting Hydrogen (and CO2) to carbohydrates? Pulling number out of thin air, I'll be very happy if it's 10% or 20% [1]. So from solar to carbohydrates they get 20%*80%*¿20%?=3% that is the double of potatoes, not an order of magnitude better.
And the conversion to proteins is even harder. They need a microorganism that can fixate Nitrogen from the air (that is very costly for the microorganism) or use a fertilizer like ammonia nitrate (that use a lot of energy in an industria plant).
[1] For an easy, one step organic reaction in the lab, the efficiency is like 60%-70%. It varies a lot, but never expect something like 99%. In the lab, most reactions use a brute force approach like boiling it in acid, instead of using a specialized enzyme. On the other hand, the transformation form H2 and CO2 to carbohydrates has like 10 or 20 steps, and each step has a small lose. I'd be happy with a global 20% efficiency, but perhaps I'm too optimistic.
"The energy efficiency of carbon dioxide fixation by a hydrogen-oxidizing bacterium"
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2013.04.153
The authors found a tradeoff between efficiency and growth rates. The highest efficiency came with the slowest growth rate. But they concluded that 50% efficiency was achievable at practical growth rates. Keep in mind also that potatoes only contain about 10% protein by dry weight while the bacteria cultivated to make single cell protein can contain 50% protein by dry weight. Soybeans are about 40% protein.
https://alphafold.com/search/text/nitrogen
I think the cool part of using solar panels to have an electrified process is that you can use non-farmland (Bill Gates is buying it all :), could use less water, also produces electricity.
In the perfect future, we are all sucking on tubes of atmospheric liquid cheese product. From pipe to pipe.
Efficiency of light is not that important, because plants reach their maximum rate of photosynthesis at fairly low light levels. In reality yield is limited by low temperatures in winter, avaliability of water, etc.
The process being proposed here requires much more investment of capital and resources than simply planting potato in the fields -> now we need solar panels, electrolysis, etc.
But if you want to improve yield by throwing money at the problem, you build a greenhouse, invest in hydroponics, etc. and your yield will grow several times.
So that would be a better point of comparison -> for a dollar or physical resources invested, does this approach give you more extra yield than a state of the art greenhouse would?
Besides - heatpumps are largely the exception in thermodynamics, expecting anything more than 100% efficiency for most non-heat moving applications should not be expected.
Wether it's something economically sustainable, or something that might become "socially accepted" or something, I don't know.
If I have to be picky, I'd rather eat a synthetic protein made with genetically modified bacteria than genetically modified cockroaches powder. You wouldn't probably notice a big difference anyway.
PROTEIN 65-70 %
FAT 5-8 %
DIETARY FIBRES 10-15 %
MINERAL NUTRIENTS 3-5%
That’s not the definition of “infinite”.
I know this is BS talk to raise funding, but let’s remind of previous myths of “infinite supply”: land, fresh water, oil.
Animal feed to grow plant-based protein?
> Unlike conventional protein production, it takes just a fraction of all these resources if any, to produce the same nutritional amount of Solein. Even photosynthesis, the way plants convert energy into food, is not as efficient as our method.
So... they use magical electricity that comes out of nowhere, and operates more efficiently that just letting a plant sit there and use the sun.
Amazing how these people blatantly lie and present half-facts so shamelessly.
Stop telling me that my future is bugs!
and there's no explanation why I would even WANT to eat this.
That's the explanation.
Ideally, yes, plant based diets would dominate, but the idea of turning renewable energy into supplemental foodstuff sounds like a huge win to me.
and don't need to be produced,
instead of blindly accepting being told that something's good for me,
just because there's a lot of money behind it.
Industrial agriculture is mining, not growing things.
Clearly it’s cruel to kill an animal even through hunting. The animal doesn’t want to be shot/stabbed/etc…
edit: as pointed out below and elsewhere, the carbon source is CO2, and I misinterpreted the way CO2 neutral is used here, my bad. However there are serious questions to ask about how they are representing and overselling their process. It is a complete misrepresentation to present this as protein synthesis out of air (in fact, the nitrogen source is ammonia [0], NOT nitrogen fixation).
[0] https://youtu.be/z8zuqR95fqA?t=136 timestamped video from solar foods
Reforesting an area would be carbon negative, and eventually the first will saturate. It's much much more carbon negative to produce biochar, biotar, or mass timber buildings.
The amount of carbon in the atmosphere, that used to be underground in coal, oil, and gas.
More than 170 gigatons. (approximately, this is just the 40% higher concentration than historical high point, based on 412 ppm co2 in atmosphere vs 300 ppm historical high point, back of the envelope).
This seems like a lot of land, a lot of trees, and would have to include harvesting and storing the trees after 100 years.