
NASA worked out how to make food out of thin air – and it could feed billions - seanwilson
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/nasas-idea-for-making-food-from-thin-air-just-became-a-reality-it-could-feed-billions/
======
Animats
_Starting in 2018, Solar Foods is participating in the ESA Business Incubation
Centre Finland._

All their news is about funding, not doing. Nor does the NASA involvement seem
to be more than a query.

This sounds like a food-from-methane scheme, prettied up with hype about
cracking water and CO2 using "renewable energy" to get the H and C needed.
That goes into a fermentation process, like a brewery.

KnipBio was doing something like that, but using methane as the feedstock.
Their web site talks about future events in 2018, so they apparently are not
doing too well.[1]

Calysta is actually doing it. They bought the technology from Statoil in
Norway, which had a plant 15 years ago making about 10,000 tons of animal feed
a year from methane. Wasn't profitable. Calysta has a pilot plant in England
making animal feed, but it's been running for several years with no scale-up.

NouriTech in the US licensed the process from Calysta and has a plant in
Memphis, TN. They're working with Cargill, the big US ag company. The address
for the plant shows a big place with railroad sidings, tanks, and trucks, but
it's a Cargill high-fructose corn sweetener plant and doesn't match the
drawings of the proposed NouriTech plant.

So it's clear that you can do this, but not clear that it makes economic
sense.

[1]
[https://www.knipbio.com/fermentation](https://www.knipbio.com/fermentation)
[2] [http://calysta.com/feedkind/](http://calysta.com/feedkind/) [3]
[http://nouritech.net/feedkind/](http://nouritech.net/feedkind/)

------
lkrubner
In his book "Small Is Beautiful" E F Schumacher made the point that energy is
fungible for almost everything else, and therefore energy is the starting
point of the economy. It's worth keeping that in mind any time you see a
headline with the words "It could feed billions." We have many, many
technologies that could feed billions, given enough energy. With enough
energy, we could grow food in a greenhouse, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
which means the growing "season" would suddenly be 400% longer (an extra 6
months of the year, an extra 12 hours of the day). Therefore, all questions of
growing food are really questions of acquiring energy.

~~~
Scaevolus
Photosynthesis is 3-6% efficient. If you can have solar-powered carbohydrate
(?) factories feeding yeast vats at a greater efficiency than that, it could
still be a net win.

------
achenatx
<<To create Solein, Solar Foods starts by using renewable energy to split
water cells into hydrogen and oxygen. Then it combines the hydrogen with CO2,
and adds potassium, sodium, and other nutrients.

Then the company feeds the concoction to microbes, which in turn create an
edible ingredient Solar Foods says is roughly 20 to 25 percent carbohydrates,
5 to 10 percent fat, and 50 percent protein.>>

Sounds like they make sugar out of CO2 and Hydrogen using renewable energy.
They feed that sugar to "microbes" \- either bacteria or (probably) yeast and
get protein.

~~~
achenatx
in doing a little more reading it is possible that have taken some of the
variety of bacteria which are capable of using hydrogen gas as an energy
source and used them to create hydrocarbon chains. If you can make alcohols,
you can make proteins/sugars etc.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/engineered-
bacter...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/engineered-bacterium-
turns-carbon-dioxide-into-methane-fuel/)

[https://phys.org/news/2016-05-bacterium-inhales-carbon-
dioxi...](https://phys.org/news/2016-05-bacterium-inhales-carbon-dioxide-
hydrogen.html)

------
scottrogowski
A number of the comments so far have been attacking Solein with something
along the lines of “why not just eat plants”. In my mind, I see two distinct
advantages of this approach as a component of altering the food production
system to reduce environmental impact.

The first is that while plants are efficient at utilizing solar energy for
their growth, we aren’t actually able to eat most of what they produce. Take
the wheat plant, for example. It is widely cultivated partly because it is so
good at producing calories cheaply. Even so, of the roots, the stalk, the
leaves, and the seeds, we only eat part of the seeds. From the seeds, we will
strip away at least the chaff and often the germ and the bran as well leaving
only the endosperm to actually eat. Even that assumes that one of a dozen
possible crop failure cases didn’t kill the entire plant before it could be
harvested. The advantage I see to the Solein manufacturing process is that we
can turn a far higher percentage of the gathered solar energy into actual
consumable calories with far less land.

The second is that a portion of the carbon footprint of modern agriculture is
transportation. The distance between where our food is grown and our local
grocery store is often thousands of kilometers. If Solein could be produced in
the same urban area that it is eaten in, then we can cut that transportation
distance to dozens of kilometers or less.

------
cortesoft
All of the benefits they talk about also apply to growing plants... how is
this better than the old way of turning sunlight, CO2, nutrients, and water
into food?

~~~
pilaf
The article cites benefits in "not being dependent on arable land, water
(i.e., rain), or favorable weather".

And this is speculation on my part, but I assume not needing pesticides, and
going straight to the end product instead of having to harvest, store and
process the plant-based food are also advantages.

~~~
ac29
> straight to the end product instead of having to harvest, store and process
> the plant-based food are also advantages

Whatever microbiology they are using (probably yeast) will certainly require
harvesting, storage and processing in order to turn into foods.

------
nevster
"and then combines it with water, nutrients and vitamins" \- uhhhhh, wait a
second....

~~~
cortesoft
It seems they have invented plants

~~~
ackbar03
I don't see anything wrong with that. Photosynthesis procedure within plants
is essentially what is taking co2 out of the atmosphere

~~~
cortesoft
Right, but the question is why is this better than plants?

~~~
jacknews
\- much less land required, and can use any land (or even at sea), under any
weather

\- simpler to handle vats of gloop than all those leaves, stems, seeds, etc

\- possibly more efficient than photosynthesis' woeful c. 1%

Obviously you're not expected to eat a plate of this stuff, it would be high-
protein 'fill' for other food, pastes/sauces, breads, etc, or for animal feed

This is likely to be much more expensive than just clearing some "free"
rainforest and planting soy/corn/etc, but that needs to be addressed anyway.

We need to start returning a large % of agricultural land to nature, not just
stop taking more, which will mean using the land left much more efficiently
and/or organically, and creating more of these direct-synthesis approaches to
food production for staples.

I see a possibility that many commodity grains could be produced by direct
synthesis, especially if they are mainly used as flours or feed. Imagine being
able to reforest, or re-prairy (or whatever it wants to do) most cereal land.

------
hn_throwaway_99
This article is just awful. I'm genuinely interested in what Solein actually
does and how they generate their food, but this "food from thin air" BS didn't
explain it.

~~~
oska
Agree. And the picture at the very top is actually of wheat, not the product.
They save the picture of the actual product for the very bottom of the
article.

------
mrb
It's annoying that in this article it's pretty obvious what the main downside
is, namely the likely very high cost of producing Solein (electricity, labor,
machinery), and the author and company make no attempts to address this issue.
In particular the fact they proudly announce they are using "renewable solar
energy" make me suspect a high amount of electricity is needed per gram of
Solein.

Edit: my suspicion is semi-confirmed by HN user achenatx: their process starts
with water electrolysis. That alone means one kg of H₂ requires a minimum of
50 kWh, costing 5 USD (at $0.10/kWh). How much Solient do they produce from 1
kg of H₂?

------
el_don_almighty
Dammit Neo, shut up and eat your glop! It has everything a growing body needs.

------
stefco_
This is cool for off-planet macronutrient production, but plants already do
this at scale on earth with excellent efficiency and relatively little
supervision. Marketing this as eco-friendly sounds, to me, like utterly
shameless greenwashing. I can't picture something short of total ecological
collapse or apocalyptic world-wide drought that could ever make it more
efficient to feed large numbers of people this way.

Notice that they compare Solein favorably to animal products, which are an
order of magnitude less efficient than plant products; if you wanted to make
substitute meats, you'd be comparing it head-to-head with soy and similar
protein sources. Even their "meat substitute" and "cultured meat" are more
processed than Solein; you'd need extra processing (i.e. energy input) to make
Solein a comparable meat-substitute product.

I'll also wager that their greenhouse gas emissions models assume some sort of
renewable energy source; until we're at 100% renewable energy for industrial
processes, Solein production would necessitate using non-renewables for the
extra energy input it requires. If you want to switch to renewable energy, and
Solein ends up using enough industrial energy to require new renewable power
plants (which, at global scales, it absolutely would), you'll have to also
factor in the energy, material, and greenhouse gas costs of those new plants.
And given that biochemical pathways in plants have had hundreds of millions of
years to perfect their efficiency, it's _really, really hard_ for me to
imagine any industrial process rivaling plant-based sequestration
efficiencies.

Also, I don't know about the nutritional or culinary properties of Solein, but
they are starting at a tremendous disadvantage compared to natural plant-based
foods that our bodies are already acclimated to. You'll need extra energy for
the industrial processes creating flavors, vitamins, and other nutrients, as
well as the processes required to make this glop palatable (see point above
about the comparison to processed meat-substitutes).

If you're worried about CO2 production from farms, you could switch to mostly
plant-based diets with non-animal meat-substitutes. Plants literally build
their own solar arrays (called "leaves"), so they don't compete with other
industrial power uses for still-scant renewable energy. You could use
renewables for the industrial processes associated with agriculture. Some
stuff, like methane production in rice paddies, is a real greenhouse gas
issue, but the general approach of using plants as an integrated solar-powered
carbon sequestration and food generation solution is well established and
constantly improving through GMOs and farming practices.

------
devilsbabe
Where are they getting their "nutrients and vitamins"?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Industrial suppliers, presumably.

Some vitamins can be created synthetically, others by modified bacteria or
yeast.

I think your wider point still stands: what is the total carbon / energy /
environmental foot print per food-unit equivalent.

------
jquery
Was this headline written by an AI that knows how to farm upvotes? Because
it's a seriously great way to advertise something extremely banal.

------
fortran77
The microbes are making the food:

> promote a natural fermentation process similar to the one that produces
> yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

It doesn't _really_ come from thin air! It's the byproduct of tiny little
creatures

------
peterwwillis
Well, really, we already can feed billions. Of the 1.88 billion bushels of
wheat produced in the USA in 2018, only 36% was consumed domestically. We also
produced about 1.1 billion metric tons of corn last year; 14% was exported,
and 96% of the remainder's domestic use was feed grain. We also produce about
20 million tons of potatoes annually, half of which is sold for processed
foods and feed.

If we produced more wheat, potatoes, and oats, and used it all for food, we
could feed several billion people just from existing US farmland.

------
incompatible
Also discussed (somewhat) 38 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315947)

------
brianberns
I stopped reading at "single-celled protein", which indicates to me that the
author does not understand basic biology. Does anyone have a better take on
this?

~~~
pstuart
If it has a wikipedia page does that change things?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-
cell_protein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein)

~~~
wpietri
Single-cell protein is a thing. Single-celled protein isn't. The website has
the former; the article, the latter.

~~~
wilg
I'm curious why you think the distinction matters? Surely there's no
confusion. And "single-celled organism" is an acceptable phrase. And a
"single-cell protein" in fact _is_ a "single-celled organism".

~~~
wpietri
I think precision always matters in writing, especially science writing. If
the author of the article is making obvious mistakes, it's reasonable to
wonder whether they're making mistakes I am not qualified to spot.

~~~
majewsky
FWIW, a Google search for "single-celled protein" turns up a bunch of
scientific papers using that term as well. I would guess that it's just a
situation where both variants are acceptable. Maybe it's a regional thing like
"color" vs. "colour".

~~~
wpietri
When I seach for "single-celled protein" I don't see any scientific papers on
the first page, and the first two hits are this very discussion. Suggesting
that if the phrase is really by scientists, it's used so very rarely that it's
a mistake, just like it is here.

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s_Hogg
Don't we already make an excess amount of food on earth? This seems handy for
off-planet, though.

~~~
pstuart
Or after we melt the icecaps...

------
Animats
Why "flagged"? Too PR?

