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Bill Gates-backed startup makes ‘butter’ out of water and carbon dioxide

A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

so what i don’t get is how any margarine could have the same flavour as butter without adding in some sort of protein and presumably a bit of sweetener, considering that butter is fat/milk protein/milk sugar (lactose)…

You can obviously get close enough (i mostly eat margarine), the non-fat content of butter is very small after all, but still surely you have to add those things to get that extra kick of flavour that butter has?

disguy_ovahea OP ,

This isn’t margarine. Margarine is made from hydrogenated vegetable oil. This process allegedly creates the same hydrocarbon chain fatty acids found in butter.

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

what it’s made from is utterly and completely irrelevant, both margarine and butter are primarily just fat. My point is that i don’t see how you can replicate the precise flavour of butter with only fat.

Xeroxchasechase ,

Margarine is dangarous, it contain high amount of trans fat. Try to avoid it

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

where on earth did you get that nonsense from? the swedish food safety agency explicitly says that modern margarine contains basically no trans fat at all, and the primary source of trans fat is diary products

Xeroxchasechase ,

Ok ok you don’t need this attitude. I wasn’t aware of the 2018 FDA ban on trans fat.

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

i mean then maybe you shouldn’t make statements like that? just go look up the contents real quick before you hit post, and if it turns out it’s completely incorrect all you need to do is click cancel and go on with life

littlebluespark ,
@littlebluespark@lemmy.world avatar

Wait. So a “butter star” is possible?

LemmySoloHer ,
@LemmySoloHer@lemmy.world avatar

Once one is discovered, there will be a NASA mission to bake a gigantic loaf of bread and launch it at the butter star.

littlebluespark ,
@littlebluespark@lemmy.world avatar

And Musky’ll have a tantrum trying to race a croissant at it first.

rsuri ,

The problem with making carbon into butter is it will just be released once someone eats it and burns off the calories. BUT, I think you can make soap from just about any oil. So you could turn carbon from the air into fake butter, turn that fake butter into soap, and then store the soap in caves, solving any potential soap shortages for the next several millennia while also solving the climate crisis.

disguy_ovahea OP ,

Butter is already made from carbon. They’re creating the same hydrocarbon chains that are in the fatty acids that butter is comprised of, just without the cow.

Adalast ,

Also, for anyone who thinks that carbon bound up in fatty acid chains in butter is released back into the atmosphere through metabolism, I will direct your attention to the population US Midwest and Great Plains. These people have been proving that you can effectively sequester butter for many decades.

disguy_ovahea OP ,

To be honest, people probably cause more environmental damage from releasing methane after eating butter. Lol

Adalast ,

Luckily methane, while a potent greenhouse gas, breaks down in the atmosphere quickly. It does break down into CO2 and water, so the question quickly becomes: “are the farts of Midwesterners more potent than the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere by making butter?”

My quick guess is luckily, no, they are not. Some amount of the butter will be stored in fatty tissues which will be sequestered 6 feet underground in a cement box eventually. Most will be shat in liquid or semi-solid form into a toilet to be processed by waste management. As long as they are responsible and compost it into nitrate rich fertilizer we should stay very comfortably ahead of the FBI (Fart to Butter Index).

disguy_ovahea OP ,

There’s nothing good about methane release. It’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. After ~12 years, it breaks down into CO2 and water, both of which continue to contribute to the problem, since water vapor has no easy way to return to Earth once in the upper atmosphere.

Human farts are not a concern, but cow farts are a huge contributor to climate change.

Adalast ,

I definitely understand that. My commentary is mostly satire based in fact. Hence the FBI at the end.

disguy_ovahea OP ,

I figured, but the first part concerned me. There are a lot of non-scientific comments on this post in a science community. I was being overly analytical. Sorry about that.

Adalast ,

No biggie. Even though it is satire, the analysis is sound. Given the amount of fatty acids that are stored in tissues in the body or expelled as “solid” waste, paired with the offset of dairy cows, so long as the waste is managed properly and not just left to aerobic decomposition, there should be able to be well in excess of 80x the volume if CO2 removed from the atmosphere as there is methane/CO2 released post-consumption. As long as whatever mega food conglomerate who starts making it uses atmospheric CO2 and doesn’t burn limestone to obtain concentrated quantities quickly.

disguy_ovahea OP ,

Absolutely. I’m hoping that by creating more products that capitalize on using carbon will encourage more VC investors in carbon capture projects.

Liz ,

Yo this would be great for some actual proper carbon sequestration. Make some butter from the air and pump it back down into the wells.

isolatedscotch ,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJslrTT-Yhc

Liz ,

So I have limitations with videos, but the argument that capturing carbon is costs more energy than it took to put into the air is valid as long as we’re still dumping carbon in the air. But, we have to stop putting carbon in the air and we have to start taking it out again.

isolatedscotch ,

completely agree with you, but until the whole world stops dumping it in the air (classic) carbon capture is worthless. I’m interested if this thing of making butter can be worth it, because you’re not just removing CO2, you are also making something that would have required farming a cow, which is much more resource intensive.

I guess we’ll need some studies done on the topic

echodot ,

It’s like a very limited Star Trek replicator. It can make anything you want as long as it’s butter.

rodneylives ,

I love it when foodstuffs get put in scarequotes.

postmateDumbass ,

Lube based butter product sounds delicious.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Nobody,

My darling,

Could call me

A fussy man -

BUT

I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"

TheReturnOfPEB ,

why do rich people want to replace any living being with a silicon version ?

Gates took billions to reinvent the cow. My guess is that Bill wants to own all that land and crops that cows eat because he is a fucking moronic hoarder.

disguy_ovahea OP ,

Cattle farming methane is a massive contributor to the greenhouse effect. This process would reduce methane output as well as consume carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas. It would help us in our fight against climate change.

Buddahriffic ,

Well, if it’s all being sold for consumption, it would be net zero carbon change for the product itself plus whatever carbon it takes to drive production.

The main advantage is the reducing the reliance on beef.

Though I gotta wonder how much demand can go down before the price reduction makes producing the volume of beef no longer worth it and only profitable if it’s scaled down because until then, they’ll just lower prices to keep producing the same amount or more because you’re a failure if line doesn’t go up.

masquenox ,

why do rich people want to replace any living being with a silicon version ?

Because then they can patent it.

So it’s no surprise that Bill “Anti-Food-Security” Gates, the world’s most famous patent racketeering parasite, has his vile little fingers in this.

DragonTypeWyvern ,

Liberals fucking furiously downvoting in defense of the oligarch that personally ensured Covid vaccines would be monopolized.

Yewb ,

They were not there when he literally stifled innovation and ruined thousands of companies and lives…

Seems his pr people have done great work over the last 20 years.

Socsa ,

Children furiously wanting to believe the world is black and white.

DragonTypeWyvern ,

Yes, you are.

kaffiene ,

Cows are one of the worst things for the environment. Massive production of methane at the cost of more water and land than any other protein source. Getting rid of methane works be the quickest way to dent global warming given how much worse than carbon it is (in the near term )

chemicalprophet ,

Isn’t that what it’s always been made of?

disguy_ovahea OP ,

Hydrocarbon chains? Yes. The success is that this process doesn’t involve cattle.

Rivalarrival ,

Germany managed to make butter out of coal during WWII.

rbesfe ,

Until we reach mass deployment of electrolyzers, all of this hydrogen will be coming from natural gas. Would be interesting to do a life cycle analysis and see what percentage of the CO2 emissions associated with producing the hydrogen end up incorporated into the product.

vxx ,

Finally, after years of research and experiments, the Savor team settled on a method that combines carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water to make butter (synthetic fat) in the lab.

isolatedscotch ,

where do they get the electricity for it? I’m not saying it’s not feasible, but they better have a solar farm nearby

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

The largest (farm) landowner in the US is backing a venture that does not require land?

disguy_ovahea OP ,

Smart investors diversify. Food production is a necessary industry.

catbum ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f119ef97-7ad6-470a-90b1-02f14a2af25b.jpeg

FourThirteen ,

What on earth is that picture?

msgomez06 ,

Canadian brand (President’s Choice) that apparently has a “memories of” product line.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

It’s a synthetic saturated fat, so basically a synthetic margarine. Butter is made from milk. So the headline should read “[…] makes ‘margarine’ out of water and CO2”, but everybody hates margarine, so I get why they chose butter instead.

laughterlaughter ,

Hey, I like margarine…

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Really? I don’t mind it as a substitute for baking, but for eating on bread or using it to fry something I don’t think it comes even close to the flavor you get from real butter.

laughterlaughter ,

Oh, butter is better, sure, but my preferences are not mutually exclusive.

For example, I like salads without dressing, though salads with dressing taste better. Does that mean that we must ditch all salads without dressing? I hope not.

FordBeeblebrox ,

Give me Kerry Gold or give me death

derpgon ,

I can’t believe it’s not BUTTER

capital ,

“I’ve tasted Savor’s products, and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter. It tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is.” Bill Gates recently wrote in his blog post.

If it’s chemically the same as butter, should we call it butter or something else?

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

“I can’t believe it’s not chemically manufactured butter!”

skeezix ,

Processed butter food

Mr_Dr_Oink ,

Margerine is made from unsaturated fats, though. So it’s not the same. Is it?

Olhonestjim , (edited )

I mean cool, but if farts release CO2 after digestion breaks down fats and proteins, then it’s not much of a carbon sink, is it? Not to mention the scale necessary to reverse climate change. We’d have to make billions of barrels of the stuff, then pump it deep underground for long term sequestration. It’ll be so energy intensive we’ll require nuclear fusion.

Dead serious, I say we do it.

sushibowl ,

It’s not intended to be a carbon sink. It’s essentially intended to be a more carbon efficient way of producing margarine without having to grow e.g. palm oil and destroy forests. They thought, instead of making plants do the work of turning water and CO2 into fats, let’s just do it in the lab.

The basic science could work, although it’s usually tough to beat “put seeds into ground and wait” on pure cost. However the fact that they compare this to butter makes me sceptical. Given how wasteful growing a whole cow is just to make some milk fat, it’s easy to look efficient compared to that. They would compare themselves to sustainably produced margarine if they were honest.

vxx ,

It’s chemically identical to butter, so we wouldn’t need milk cows.

explore_broaden ,

Most of the CO2 savings comes from not raising cows, you’re correct that the carbon capture in the butter wouldn’t matter that much due to digestion, but it is likely not all the carbon will be released as CO2 again.

Asetru ,

During WW2, due to the food shortage, Germans did this using the carbon from coal… The process is old and known.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter

Let’s see if the process can be made more efficient this time. Allegedly, the product was virtually indistinguishable from butter.

derpgon ,

It is just regular margarine, and for me, it is inedible. Tastes like vaseline.

RecluseRamble ,

Allegedly, the product was virtually indistinguishable from butter.

Well it says

Margarine made from them was found to be nutritious and of agreeable taste

Doesn’t sound indistinguishable to me.

Etterra ,

If it tastes and spreads like a tub of Land o Lakes then I’ll probably try it. I don’t care where the hell it comes from as long as it tastes correct.

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