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Biotech

Startup Makes Butter Using CO2 and Water (newatlas.com) 206

A Californian startup funded by Bill Gates is making rich, fatty "butter" using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen, with other dairy-free alternatives in the works. New Atlas reports: The San Jose company, Savor, uses a thermochemical process to create its animal-like fat, which is free of the environmental footprint of both the dairy industry and plant-based alternatives. "They started with the fact that all fats are made of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms," Gates wrote in a blog post. "Then they set out to make those same carbon and hydrogen chains -- without involving animals or plants. They ultimately developed a process that involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to trigger the separation of fatty acids and then the formulation of fat."

"The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first," Gates wrote. "But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals." Savor's 'butter' is easily produced and scalable, but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. Gates is hoping, however, that his support will do more than start a conversation. "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," he added. "And most important, it tastes really good -- like the real thing, because chemically it is."
The research has been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
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Startup Makes Butter Using CO2 and Water

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  • by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:06AM (#64631753)

    If it's cheaper than butter, then I might be interested; there's been a vegan alternative to butter promoted in the UK recently that did taste good, but it wasn't especially cheap. Though the definition of 'cheaper' does deserve hard questions; how far is the normal production of butter subsidised by the production of pollution that isn't being paid for.

    • by Barsteward ( 969998 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:19AM (#64631783)
      Does this fall into the "ultra-processed" category therefore not so good for you?
      • by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @03:48AM (#64631865)

        The problem with ultra-processed food is usually not the ultra-processed food, .but the lack of un- or low-processed food.

        Furthermore, the issues with that "ultra-processed" food category are wide and varied in itself. Some items have high sugar or fat, some have lower fiber than the stuff it is supposed to replace, some have indeed additives that don't become a problem until they are in everything you eat and adding up to critical levels. Some stuff in that category isn't even that highly processed at all! Engineer together low processed Salt, Fat and Sugar and a few flavors and you have something that should NOT be your sole diet, but triggers all addiction centers in your brain: Cookies

        And there is nothing wrong with cookies but they still should not be the only thing you eat.

        That "ultra-processed-food" thing is a rule of thumb. And as long as 95% of food engineering effort goes into making food cheaper at lower qualities, it is an absolutely valid rule of thumb. Would be different if the goal of that whole processing would be high quality food. Food does not HAVE TO be bad just because it is produced in a big factory, but it usually is.

        But to circle back to the artificial butter: This is by no way butter. This is the chemical main ingredient of butter. It is an ingredient that with water, lactose, carotene and flavors could be made into artificial butter. Or be used as an ingredient to replace butter

      • I know little about this so we'll see what the ultimate answer is - but I'd say this kind of defines 'ultra processed' at least from my 10000 metre level.
        • I know little about this so we'll see what the ultimate answer is - but I'd say this kind of defines 'ultra processed' at least from my 10000 metre level.

          I think that the whole definition - even the name - of "ultra Processed" is just clumsy. When I smoke a brisket or make pulled pork, I'm subjecting the product to hella processing. Using a process. A lot of process. Gets rubbed down with a mixture of spices and salt, left overnight to assimilate, then smoked for 12 hours and "mopped" wit a mixture of vinegar, beer, a bit of oil, and yet more spices.

          Soy Burgers are highly processed. But any health effects are more based on the phytoestrogen load they giv

      • Yes, I hear that bovine-sourced carbon and hydrogen atoms are far more healthy than atmospheric carbon and electrolyzed hydrogen atoms.

        There's a statistically higher chance of the synthetic butter being healthier, because it won't be carrying all the other stuff that can be secreted into milk, such as antibiotics.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        "ultra-processed" is a catch-all term, that holds lots of things that don't fit the rule. Like yoghurt.

        Lots of "ultra-processed" things ARE bad for you, but not all of them.

        This would definitely fall into the ultra-processed category. It's not fair to say "therefore it's bad for you", but it could well be proper to say "therefore it's likely to be bad for you".

    • Initially it could / will cost more - new inventions almost always do. You usually need to get them to scale. However, in this case, if its using the air, and a massively lower amount of water, then the process / machines will be the costs. Almost certain to be bespoke at this point in the inventions life cycle, so probably expensive. If it can be rolled out, costs can go down. How much it "costs" by the time its being sold in supermarkets or widespread is impossible to answer now.

      • Exactly this. Think of what goes into making traditional butter: tons of feed, acres of pasture, veterinary care, farm labor, milk processing, and industrial processes to churn it into butter.

        This, if it scales, skips everything right up to the industrial process, substituting big tanks of CO2 and water, and a big fat electrical wire as the inputs.

        • ...industrial processes to churn it into butter.

          That may be true today, but up until the mid-19th century, butter was made by hand. It wasn't until both mechanical churns and adequate refrigeration became available that factory-made butter became practical.
    • by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      I recently encountered some "vegetarian/vegan butter" that was first, rather expensive and second, it contained trans-polyunsaturated fats. So, thanks, but no thanks. If these startups wish to be of real service to humanity, then they should concentrate on making fuel.

      • It is question of economy.

        1kg of butter costs much more than 1kg of fuel

        So if the process is the same in terms of cost - then it is smarter to start with butter...

        Especially that vegan butter costs even more than standard one and tastes worse

      • âoeWe almost got it. Unfortunately this fuel is too viscous below 18c.â âoeIs it edible?!â âoeUhh yeah I guessâ âoeShip itâ

      • Purposely created transfats are completely forbidden in the US, not rounded dow to zero forbidden, completely forbidden. It can not be used as an ingedient, for a long long time now.

    • It's CO2 and water, what could it cost, $10?
  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:06AM (#64631755) Homepage

    So where does the hydrogen come from then, do they have some kind of H2 well they can extract it from? Aside from that, who wouldn't want to eat butter thats so processed its never been anywhere near anything organic. Its effectively coming from a chemical plant. Yum!

    • Lots of people eat margarine, so apparently weâ(TM)re quite capable of substituting butter with highly processed fats.
      This actually sounds like the upsides of both products.

      • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:18AM (#64631779) Homepage

        Margarine is generally hydrogenated vegetable oil (which has its own issues, not least traces of nickel catalyst being left behind), but its not manufactured from raw materials.

        • RIght, butter is also not manufactured from just carbon dioxide and water. The matter here is whether the end product is more similar to butter or margarine, and it looks like this product leans heavily toward being margarine both for what it is and what it lacks.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      The same kind of people who eat cheese from an aerosol can & consume so called "energy drinks" with reckless abandon.
    • It's easy to make H from H2O with electricity. Watch the pink slime video about chicken nuggets and tell me that reverse engineering chemically identical oils from water and greenhouse gasses doesn't deserve a chance.

      Although tbh this is probably IP they bought from a company that couldn't make their hydrocarbon generator cheap enough for gasoline.

      To put this in weed terms, they figured out how to make synthetic THC. No terpenes etc though, so it'll probably have a flatter flavor.

    • by Tx ( 96709 )

      "...process that involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water"

      I know the information is all the way down on the fourth line of the summary, and thus very hard to get to, but if you really try, it is there to be found.

      • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Wow, thanks for the heads up there genius! I know that, but my point was what generates the electricity? If its not green power or nuclear then there's a greenhouse gas cost in doing so.

        • by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Wow, thanks for the heads up there genius! I know that...

          Not quite sure what justifies your snark there. Earlier you asked where they were getting the H2 and asked if they had an H2 well. So, either you did not actually know, and you're lying here, or you were lying in that post.

    • The electrolyze the water to produce H2 and O2. The actual formula is 2xH20->2xH2 + 1xO2. This butter is not processed. It's never been cut with any type of utensil.
    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      So where does the hydrogen come from then, do they have some kind of H2 well they can extract it from?

      Well, in point of fact, they do. For example: using bacteria to extract hydrogen from old oil wells [wired.com]. Of course, obviously natural gas wells are hydrogen wells as well with a little cracking of the methane. Or they could get the hydrogen from water through various processes. As for the butter being heavily processed, as others have pointed out, this may constitute less "processing" than making butter the traditional way. In any case, the concern about processed or "ultra-processed" foods doesn't really have

  • by heinternets ( 4001613 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:08AM (#64631757)
    There is no difference between a triglyceride made by a cow and the exact same triglyceride molecule made in a lab, so everyone should be all for it. Unless they are afraid of science.
    • Or they just love and trust real butter maybe.

    • by StygianBrood ( 1609981 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @03:03AM (#64631827)
      The butter delivers many different things except triglyceride: Butter is rich in various vitamins, including A, D, E, B12, and K2 (source: https://www.healthline.com/nut... [healthline.com]). There are also diffreent fats - wanted (Omegas) and unwanted (I don'tknow, maybe like Cholesterol). Maybe instead promoting artificially made butter, they should make such a mix that would allow them to promote it as the healthiest butter?
      • by tirnacopu ( 7327590 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @03:57AM (#64631881)
        Indeed, my reaction to reading even the whole article was a "huh?" - surely those people can't be so naive as to think butter = fat. There are likely hundreds of other ingredients, varying on animal source (goat, cow), nutrients fed to the cattle, region in the world, exact species so many factors in play. This article basically says all the work a Swiss farmer does to produce the best milk in the world is useless as the result is just some fat - if ever there was a reason for the to abandon their neutrality and go to war!
      • If you're eating enough butter for it to be a substantial source of vitamins that's probably not going to go well.

    • Yes, there is a difference, although not in the triglyceride molecule itself. It's the manufacturing process itself. We're just not as good as nature.

      Any chemical reaction in a lab is going to have residual reactants and solvents. If the chemistry is completely aqueous, then the "solvent" is water, so that isn't necessarily a problem, but there are still trace amounts of the original reactants. Then you have side and intermediate reactions. These are much easier to control in a laboratory than at industrial

      • Methane emissions is a serious issue with cattle.

        • Methane emissions is a serious issue with cattle.

          As we struggle with the effects of what happens when one species overpopulates to an extreme, the issue isn't with cattle - it's too damn many people. https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info] A mere 8.1 billion people now.

          And since most people enjoy their cow products, the number of cows increase to meet demand. And people want their civilization and all of the CO2 emissions that brings.

          We are going to continue until nature takes care of the problem. It isn't the moocows. It is humans and our inability to c

          • by nasch ( 598556 )

            I disagree. There's no reason 8 billion (or 10 billion) people couldn't live on Earth in a sustainable way. Whether we actually get there in time is another question, but the problem is not the number of people, the problem is the things those people are doing. Fewer people would of course be a relatively straightforward way to mitigate the problems, but unless you get down to, I don't know, under a billion, it will not be sufficient. And I would expect that level of population reduction would actually

    • by Morky ( 577776 )

      There is no difference between a triglyceride made by a cow and the exact same triglyceride molecule made in a lab, so everyone should be all for it. Unless they are afraid of science.

      Science clearly does not yet have a complete picture of human biology, so eating foods we evolved with seems a good bet. Science brought us trans fats, remember.

  • Start with butter (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 )
    And soon all our food gets made in a lab. No more farms = more land for suburbs so we can keep building Mcmansions.
    • It's not a binary choice. *Some* food, the most carbon intensive foods, have the incentive to be made in a lab because if they can do it and it's not gross (it's all kinda been gross so far) then why not? IF it's what they say, it's probably better than oat milk lattes.

      • by ghoul ( 157158 )
        If chemically its the same as butter than for health reasons its just as bad as natural butter say for your arteries. If however your reasons for veganism are religious, animal rights or environmentalism this works.
        • Veganism IS a religion, or at least a quasi-religious philosophy. Strict vegetarians can generally wear wool coats or silk ties.

    • Re:Start with butter (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wildstoo ( 835450 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @03:57AM (#64631877)

      I don't think farm closure and housing construction are related.

      The problem is people see farms and have been conditioned to think "natural, healthy, clean" when the reality is the opposite.

      Many types of farms are terrible polluters, and then there's the animal antibiotics and the zoonotic diseases and the animal faeces in rivers and the pesticides and the patent-encumbered seeds and the water scarcity and on and on and on.

      We can do all of this so much better, and we should. We will always need some farming, but I won't mourn the decline of the animal side of the dairy industry if we develop genuinely viable alternatives that are less ecologically damaging.

  • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @03:14AM (#64631833)

    Some Germans figured this out in the 1930s. This is hardly some technological breakthrough.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    While Germans were using coal as the source of carbon and this Bill Gates funded effort is using CO2 the chemical process is much the same. I suspect that this new variation on the theme of "coal butter" would be quite energy intensive because they are starting with carbon that's already been oxidized as opposed to carbon that is not oxidized in the form of coal. This energy has to come from somewhere. In the case of butter from dairy cows the energy comes from plants that the cattle have eaten, so it's solar powered. Bill Gates says this process "uses no farmland" but if it's using solar power then it is still using land, and depending on the specifics it could be using more or less land. It could also be using a lot of water because solar panels need to be washed and cooled. It could be using a lot of toxic chemicals because those solar panels are made from something. I'm not so sure this would be environmentally beneficial.

    The US Navy has been working on producing aviation fuels from the nuclear power plants that exist on aircraft carriers and potentially other nuclear powered vessels. They've been working on this since at least 2010 but the progress hasn't moved much since there's not been much interest in funding this from Congress. They finally got approval for some limited field tests while Trump was in in the White House, apparently President Trump was supportive of nuclear powered vessels for the Navy and Coast Guard.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    From where I sit this idea of carbon neutral butter is an effort to get some public interest in developing the Fischer-Tropsch process, likely with the intention to bring down the costs to where it is feasible as a means to produce carbon neutral fuels. People are not likely to spend a lot of money on some specialty fuel for their cars but they might consider paying a premium for what is effectively just margarine out of the novelty of it or something.

  • Of Kraft feeds his kids Kraft dinner?

  • Marketing (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @04:45AM (#64631925)

    I can hear it now... "I can't believe it's not CO2 and H2O."

    [ Apologies to the original [wikipedia.org] slogan. :-) ]

  • Nope.....that simple !!!
  • I'd really love to know how they will ensure that their product is free from trans fats.

  • by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @07:57AM (#64632195)
    Call it "butter" all you want, but we all know that this stuff is margarine's margarine.
  • if it does not come from the cream that is skimmed off of cow's milk then its NOT butter
  • And this day went down in history as the day that a rudimentary implementation of Star Trek's "food replicator" was first revealed to the world.

    Gene Roddenberry would be proud.

  • Either you die a villain, or you live long enough to become a hero. That seems to be the Bill Gates plan.

  • Leave a pat of this butter outside for a few days and see if critters come for it. If they don't eat it, you probably shouldn't, either.
    • For science's sake, better put a pat of real butter beside it. Also, it should be noted that there are some critters--specifically, my dog--that sometimes eat things that turn out not to be edible.
  • I Can't Believe It's Not Seltzer!
  • using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen, with other dairy-free alternatives

    Was that particular CO2 and Hydrogen specifically sourced from bovines, or does any CO2 and Hydrogen feedstock work?

    What the fuck kind of writing is that?

  • but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge

    I don't know, it worked just fine for margarine.
    Never underestimate the power of marketing.

  • by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @10:22AM (#64632607)

    According to US Code 321a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]

    21 U.S. Code 321a - “Butter” defined

    For the purposes of the Food and Drug Act of June 30, 1906 (Thirty-fourth Statutes at Large, page 768) “butter” shall be understood to mean the food product usually known as butter, and which is made exclusively from milk or cream, or both, with or without common salt, and with or without additional coloring matter, and containing not less than 80 per centum by weight of milk fat, all tolerances having been allowed for.

  • I'll stick to real fats, not another source of empty calories.
  • ...2 people mixing liquid:
    Person A is mixing heavy cream and natural air
    Person B is mixing water and their exhaling breath

    You have to consume one of the mixtures after 5 minutes of them mixing. Which will you consume? Give me a fkng break

  • Frederik Pohl had his characters eating CHON food in his Heechee Saga 50 years ago.
  • The carbon that they want to reduce is still you.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'm just a consumer, not in a position to properly evaluate this, but I'm old enough to remember when butter substitutes made with hydrogenated vegetable oil was the new big thing, and that did not end well. So I think I'll just stick with real dairy butter and olive oil for now and let everyone else be the test case for this new stuff.

    I'm sure it will be fine.

  • Bill Gates needs to stop fucking around with the food supply.

  • "I can't believe it's not Windows!"

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