Butter substitute made from CO2? Carbon-capture technology could help us replace unsustainable palm oil
Butter substitute made from CO2? Carbon-capture technology could help us replace unsustainable palm oil
A new type of dietary fat that doesn’t require animals or large areas of land to produce could soon be on sale in the US as researchers and entrepreneurs race to develop the first “synthetic” foodstuffs.
US start-up Savor has created a “butter” product made from carbon, in a thermochemical system closer to fossil fuel processing than food production. “There is no biology involved in our specific process,” says Kathleen Alexander from the firm.
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Synthetic fats could revolutionise the food system by providing calories while freeing up land for conservation and carbon storage, says Alexander. Products made this way could also provide a food source in the event of environmental disaster. “If we had an emergency, this could feed the whole planet for a really long time,” she says.
If the process of synthetic fat production is powered with renewable energy and made using captured carbon as a feedstock, it could be “dramatically better than anything we are doing in agriculture today”, says Steven Davis at Stanford University, the lead author of the study.
He thinks synthetic foods could offer climate benefits. “I don’t think we will get to the point where we are making all our food synthetically, but if we could make a dent in it by synthesising things like these otherwise quite-greenhouse-gas-intensive oil crops such as palm oil and soybeans, we could really reduce the amount of land that we need for our food supply,” he says.
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