No Cows Involved: How One Company Is Making Creamy Butter From Thin Air

3 mins

A start-up company backed by billionaire Bill Gates is literally making butter out of thin air. Using a biochemical process, […]

A start-up company backed by billionaire Bill Gates is literally making butter out of thin air.

Using a biochemical process, the company is developing ways to make fats out of carbon dioxide taken from the air and hydrogen from water, all without the need for animals, plants, or farmland.

The brains behind the initiative are called Savor, a company run under the umbrella of Orca Sciences that has received investment from Microsoft founder Gates.

By cutting farming out of the equation, the aim is to slash the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by agriculture, which accounts for up to 8.5 per cent of global emissions.

‘The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does,’ Gates explained.

‘Most important, it tastes really good – like the real thing, because chemically it is. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter.’

Fats are simply made out of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms, said the company. So it’s possible to obtain these chemical building blocks from water and air, and then use biochemical processes to rejig them into fats that are molecularly identical to those found in animals and plants.

Whipping up change

The company is also fashioning fats like the ones in meat, butter, and milk, as well as looking to tackle the problem of palm oil, the most widely consumed plant-based fat in the world that has a massive impact on the natural world through deforestation.

Together with scientists from the University of California, Irvine, Orca Science published a paper in the journal Nature Sustainability explaining their vision of how many dietary fats could be artificially synthesised.

They showed that farm-grown animal fats create around one to three grams of carbon dioxide per thousand calories, while they can make the same amount of lab-grown fats with less than a gram of equivalent emissions and nearly zero emissions if using carbon capture from the air and non-emitting sources of electricity.

‘Large-scale synthesis of edible molecules through chemical and biological means without agricultural feedstocks is a very real possibility. Such “food without the farm” could avoid enormous quantities of climate-warming emissions while also safeguarding biodiverse lands that might otherwise be cleared for farms,’ Steven Davis, lead study author and professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine.

‘I like the idea of not depending on photosynthesis for everything we eat. At whatever scale, synthesizing food will alleviate competition between natural ecosystems and agriculture, thereby avoiding the many environmental costs of farming.’

He added: ‘The beauty of the fats is that you can synthesize them with processes that don’t involve biology. It’s all chemistry, and because of that, you can operate at higher pressures and temperatures that allow excellent efficiency. You could therefore build big reactors to do this at large scales.’

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