• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Lab-Made Butter Created From CO2 Tastes Like The Real Thing, Says Bill Gates

July 17, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A start-up is literally making butter out of thin air. Using a host of biochemical wizardry, 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.

Advertisement

The brains behind the initiative are called Savor, a company run under the umbrella of Orca Sciences that has received investment from billionaire Bill 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 percent 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 in a blog post about the work.

One of Savor’s latest products is butter, which according to Bill, tastes just like the real deal.

“Most important, it tastes really good – like the real thing, because chemically it is,” Gates added. 

Advertisement

“I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter,” he said. 

Fats are simply made out of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. 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. 

A hot pan melting butter that was creating using the newly refined chemical processes.

A hot pan melting butter that was created using the newly refined chemical processes.

Image credit: Steven Davis / UCI

Along with fashioning fats like the ones in meat, butter, and milk, Savor is also looking to tackle the problem of palm oil, the most widely consumed plant-based fat in the world that has a hefty impact on the natural world.

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

Advertisement

They showed that farm-grown animal fats create around 1 to 3 grams (0.04 to 0.1 ounces) 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.

“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, said in a statement. 

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

One of the biggest challenges is making the process cost-effective, thereby lowering its potential price and making it more attractive to consumers. However, the researchers have said that scaling up the manufacturing shouldn’t be too much of a problem in theory. 

Advertisement

“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,” said Professor Davis.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers
  2. “Tomato Flu” Outbreak In India May Actually Be This Common Childhood Illness
  3. What Does The “GPT” In ChatGPT Actually Stand For?
  4. Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber Has Really Been To Space

Source Link: Lab-Made Butter Created From CO2 Tastes Like The Real Thing, Says Bill Gates

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away
  • NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Recorded Evidence Of Electrified Dust Devils On Mars
  • “Hymn to Babylon”: Missing Mesopotamian Text Dating Back Nearly 3,000 Years Discovered
  • Multiple New Species Of Cute Spotty And Stripy Geckos Discovered In Remote Cambodia
  • ChatGPT May Be Surprisingly Good At Piloting Spacecraft, Taking 2nd Place In Spaceflight Competition
  • Incredible Supernova Finding Shows That “Double-Detonation Mechanism” Happens In Nature
  • Soda Cans, Asthma Inhalers, And… Water Bottles? All Things That Could Explode In Your Car This Summer
  • Video: Is There An Ideal Sleeping Position?
  • If You Look Up At The Right Time Today, You Will See A Giant “X” On The Moon
  • We May Have Our Third Interstellar Visitor And It’s Nothing Like The Previous Two
  • Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild For The First Time
  • How Easy Is It For A Country To Change Its Time Zone?
  • Earth’s First Commercial Space Station Set To Launch In 2026
  • Black Hole Moon: Rogue Planets With Weird Signatures Could Be A Sign Of Advanced Alien Life
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version