- 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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Bill Gates will eat the real thing anyway.
Edit: this comment is not about Bill Gates. It’s not even about butter.
I don’t get it, what do you mean?
I don’t either. Carbon based butter sounds like a healthier alternative to traditional butter.
I’m having a hard time imagining that tho
If it is exactly the same compounds, how should it be more or less healthy?
Less lactose and fats I imagine
If it is exactly the same compounds, it isn’t less of something. If it is less of something it won’t taste like butter.
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It doesn’t, I have yet to taste any cheese alternatives that can substitute parmigiano reggiano and pecorino romano for my Carbonara or salads, likewise with red meat and butter there’s really aren’t any alternatives at the moment (haven’t tried labgrown meat yet, that might be an actual alternative). I have tried almost all commercially available alternatives in danish grocery stores and none do what they promise.
Just to be clear, I don’t hate on alternatives. I hate products that don’t live up to their promise. Plus I try to avoid heavily processed products and that includes many alternatives.
less harmful errors from the animal industry like residue antibiotics and hormones.
This sounds less like uplifting news and more like replacing something good with something proprietary and patentable, in the name of greenwashing.
Rich fucks will provide any solution but reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
Something good?
You know the “real butter”.
yeah! natural butter! the kind that takes cows to produce! that real butter! the same cows that produce enormous amounts of methane! the same cows that are treated poorly! that REAL butter! not this chemically identical crap! FUCK chemically identical! what has chemistry even done for us recently?!
This is also my reservation about this type of thing.
…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.
Margarine?
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 this process can tune how kling the R chains get, can’t we use it as a viable petrochemical substitute? To at least make various feedstocks, albeit being energy intensive?
We don’t need to make butter now - use it to fill niche applications where very precise chain lengths are needed (for cost/profits) then branch into other premium/environment sensitive applications?
can’t we use it as a
viablepetrochemical substitute?Yes, and no. It can be technically viable, yes. That was the primary objective of the Germans in WWII, and the USAF recently: to replace lost oil reserves.
But it is very unlikely to ever be economically viable. Oil producers can easily underbid Fischer-Tropsch production.
Most of agriculture is also rarely economically viable without strong subsidies. Iirc sea oil drilling is also only made viable after strong initial subsidies.
Very few strategically important industries are economically viable without strong subsidies or regulations to start/protect them.
Catalytic converters and switch away from CFCs would have never taken off without regulations for example.
You’re right, but I am curious whether they’ll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.
And they’re specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they’re looking for.
It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I’m not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.
Why is this uplifting news?
It could eliminate billions of animal deaths.
I didn’t know you had to kill an animal to make butter.
You can skip directly to the part dedicated to dairy if you can’t stomach it all.
Read about the veal industry, because it’s a natural product of the milk (and butter) industry. To produce milk year round, dairy cows are inseminated (generally artificially as its more controlled and efficient than by stud), in order to keep them pregnant or with calf all year. The male calves are ‘unwanted coproduct’ and either culled immediately, or sent off to veal farms, some are fed for a few hours or weeks then slaughtered as ‘bob veal’, infant veal.
The only way to consume cows milk & butter without an animal dying for it would be to find a super niche ‘ethical dairy farm’ that raises cows for dairy only (not veal), and does not slaughter ‘excess’ infant cows or heifers that have gotten too old and been retired (usually they head off to the slaughterhouse also). If you find such a place, contrats you’ve found a unicorn - enjoy your ethical milk.
At scale, you indirectly do. The cows need to be pregnant or recently pregnant to produce milk, which means a lot more cattle than you want as their population grows. The solution is to cull the herd by turning them into meat products so they don’t destroy your fields.
And conditions in an industrial dairy are fairly fuckin bleak too
Just a hydrogen atom away from being plastic.
So, can we turn the garbage patch into butter?
Butter is already just hydrocarbons, tho
but it comes from the nipples of perpetually impregnated and enslaved creatures so I guess guilt-free carbons?
You vastly overestimate the amount of guilt I feel
I almost feel jealous but I’d rather feel something
I feel the delicious flavor of butter in my mouth
Sad.
I don’t think you understand that not all creatures are tortured.
Anything but stop polluting…
We could cut our carbon emissions? NO, no! This is an opportunity for profits! We can use this to squeeze just that bit more money out of people and it sets us up nicely to replace real butter when the total collapse of the ecosystem means that real dairy becomes an impossible luxury.
So, how’s that work on bread made from sand coming along?
Replacing a large amount of agriculture, which produces a lot of emissions, could potentially cut emissions.
The last step in the process is being glossed over, where they mention the final ingredient is glycerol. Google says the primary ways we get glycerol is from plants, animals, or good ol oil. They specifically say this doesn’t use plant or animal products, so I’m left assuming this entire process hinges on ‘drill baby drill’
I just read an article about scientists researching how to darken parts of the the sun to fight climate change lol
We are past the point of runaway. Even if stopped all greenhouse gasses from being added today would still get hotter. We need solutions to allow us to survive that time.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
But this is not good either.
why?
I’m pretty sure the point is to reduce reliance on diary products and therefore livestock farming, a major source of global warming.
Sure, if you want to call a hydrocarbon like methane “carbon” I guess. Why not.
Failing to parse this one; could I ask what did I miss in the article?
They focused on the CO2 and the hydrogen from the water, but the underlying feedstock for this synthetic hydrocarbon product is actually the Methane (from natural gas) that they quickly glossed over.
Even the blurb in the description contains all the reference you need.
I see the methane; but it comes right after ‘pulling carbon out of the air’. Still, appreciate being held to a standard I guess.
they aren’t using pure carbon, but compounds. the title suggests otherwise
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.
I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho
“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.
So, it’s probably more healthy then, with unsaturated fatty acids?
Sounds totally safe.
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.
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.
Both of those things are basically C, H, and O.
So are you
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.
If it’s not dairy, is this not margarine rather than butter?
Also, a
proprietary process
Ugh, capitalism
proprietary process
Where the carbon is replaced with butter.
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.
That is absolutely wild…
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
Don’t say the m-word, it makes milk boys nervous
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.)
if Gates is Mr Proprietary, Jobs is King Proprietary
was
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? 🙄
