Fats from thin air: Startup makes butter using CO2 and water

"The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor’s become affordable to the masses – either the same cost as animal fats or less," Gates wrote. "Savor has a good chance of success here, because the key steps of their fat-production process already work in other industries."

So it seems they're onto the price problem already. If they can bring the price down fast enough, maybe there's a chance for this product.

The most profitable thing you can do with captured carbon is probably either burning it or turning it into plastic. The problem is that it is orders of magnitude cheaper to pump carbon from the ground instead of capturing it from the air. The second problem is that burning the captured carbon is forbidden if you want to use carbon capture to reverse global warming.

I would say the issue is more it's not a real butter, because it could be sold cheap as a byproduct of the process

I don't know how it's working, but I imagine a "killer app" could be in space stations by capturing CO2 emitted by astronauts and produce stuff.

This strategy is called CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage), as opposed to CCS (without the U). As someone who as previously worked in the field, I think it’s a bad idea.

Carbon capture is expensive. Even if you capture at concentrated point sources like power plants or factories, and capture only between 80-95% of the emitted CO2, it’s still quite expensive (e.g. natural gas power can be roughly 25% more expensive when you add carbon capture), and it’s already hard enough to build the capture capacity that we would need to make an impact on global warming.

The goal of paying for all that should be to remove those emissions from the world, whereas most utilization processes end up with some or all of that CO2 in the atmosphere in the end. In which case you have wasted energy and money while not saving the environment.

It can still work in developing countries where the cost of switching is lower due to the "newer" things not being present yet. Think of fiber lines being laid out first in some areas, so they have a better connectivity than some first-world places. Same with payment systems. China and India are arguably a lot better with payments because they simply skipped the credit card phase. You can literally pay a street vendor in India through a QR code.

> But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center

If you discount all externalities that is. Same as cleaning being a "cost centre", until you think what happens if nobody is there to clean, trash piles up, etc.

Renewable energy, and particularly _wind_ energy, pose a weird new economic question; what if energy is sometimes free (or indeed has a small negative cost; it's generally cheaper to overproduce than to halt the turbines, if you can sink the overproduction somewhere), but you can't control when that happens, or even predict with high accuracy when that happens? We can expect to see a lot more things trying to answer that question.

> yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change.

Well, about that example:

1. Obligatory first point: This is an example of a systematic problem of capitalism, which by default promotes (corporate) profit seeking over other considerations and interests, making it difficult to achieve them.

2. The state could have, theoretically, taxed the purchase of new plastic products, and/or given tax benefits for switching from new-plastic to recycled-plastic, reversing the "cheaper" incentive.

3. There are uses of recycled plastic where new plastic is just, well, just note used (probably because it provides no benefit). Example: Bricks for the construction industry:

https://plaex.ca/about-plaex-building-systems-mortarless-int...

caveat: Have not researched that extensively

4. Quality of recycled plastic can be improved significantly by a combination of sorting and contaminant removal; and it seems that even with these actions, it might be cheaper - on the market as it exists now - than virgin plastic production. There's a paper by McKinsey on this matter:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/b...

>yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient.

I would say that should make plastic recyclers a fair target for government subsidies since they're not making a financial profit, but are a net social benefit.

Synthetic fuels are a killer app. Especially for transport and home heating (where we have storage and delivery infrastructure nicely worked out).

Like you say, price is an issue, but we could opt into it as a society by restricting use of extracted hydrocarbons.

This is amazing - is there a catch? What's up with the "Finnish investors only" rule?

This just sounds like a different version of mycoprotein or quorn.

Not to discount their efforts, the more like them the better.

Even better beef dripping.

Dripping on toast - lovely.

Yeah, or at least sugar? Why fat? That's strange.

So how it works is they have specially bred or engineered microorganisms (usually bacteria, yeast, or algae) in fermentation vats. There's been a lot of these startups, going back 10-20 years at least. They can get sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils, or even hormones like insulin, depending on the gene expression. Many have been focused on biofuels for engines and heating. This startup is hydrogenating the oil into margarine. Technically they pull carbon from the air, and hydrogen can be sourced either from water or fossil fuels. It takes a lot of energy to make that into hydrocarbons.

It wasn’t always popular. In fact it took tremendous effort of public deception, corruption and lobbying to make margarine a staple today. But I’m sure Gates has pockets deep enough to repeat that.

Consider the GMO panic. People will be against the concept for a long time, no matter how reasonable that position is.

> Margarine has always been pretty popular

Has it? There are people who use it for ethical or cost saving reasons, but I've never seen anyone say that they actually prefer the taste over butter.

And most "truffle" oil is made from petroleum.

I think the newness is something people can easily get over if it actually tastes good and isn't expensive.

When is leaded gasoline good in any volume? I would also ask that about hfcs - I am in the UK so we don't get very much of this at all, surely pure sugar is better all round. Tobacco is also doubtful.