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I wonder if they can use CO2 that comes from industrial carbon capture, or if it needs to be something purer that takes a lot of energy to produce.
Also, I'm not sure if we can get industrial volumes of hydrogen from sources other than fossil fuels now. Its been a while, but last I checked it was coming from things like byproducts from reformers.
It would need to be food grade CO2. So breweries would be a good source.
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.
How does the cost per co2 captured compare to planting more trees? Or is this just another VC scam?
If CO2 is a byproduct of another process, then I'd make a guess it is fairly cheap. The flaw here is that CO2 and H2 are both products of steam reforming using methane... Which is to say, the cheaper version might just come from using natural gas. Hydrogen has to be sourced from some energy consuming process, and that too is often from the methane steam reformation. So it's certainly possible, but yet again is ready to become yet another "green" product made from fossil fuel. Doesn't have to be, but I can be.
Edit: to correct a discrepancy, the article mentioned hydrogen, but if the hydrgon comes from water used in the process then some of the issues of providing H2 is less big. But either way I expect this to be energy costly. Nevertheless, a lab made product is still something that doesn't need large areas of land to produce.
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.
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.
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 )
So this new carbon sequestering program is going to be kind of a good news / bad news thing. ..
There are ≈950 gigatons of excess CO2 in the atmosphere 27% of that by weight is carbon, the us population is 333milion, so if every American eats 770lbs of carbon sequestered butter we will solve climate change.
Of course the danger is that this is cancelled out by increased carbon emissions from a making a commensurate amount of toast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like saturated fat. Don't eat it. Queue ketobro pseudoscience.
Multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios of total and cardiometabolic mortality for 1-tablespoon/day increment in cooking oil/fat consumption. Forest plots show the multivariable HRs of total (a) and cardiometabolic (b) mortality associated with 1-tablespoon/day increment in butter, margarine, corn oil, canola oil, and olive oil consumption. HRs were adjusted for age, sex, BMI, race, education, marital status, household income, smoking, alcohol, vigorous physical activity, usual activity at work, perceived health condition, history of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer at baseline, Healthy Eating Index-2015, total energy intake, and consumption of remaining oils where appropriate (butter, margarine, lard, corn oil, canola oil, olive oil, and other vegetable oils). Horizontal lines represent 95% CIs
Cooking oil/fat consumption and deaths from cardiometabolic diseases and other causes: prospective analysis of 521,120 individuals https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-021-01961-2/figures/1
Isn’t that what it’s always been made of?
Germany managed to make butter out of coal during WWII.