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.
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.
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.
<<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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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".
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.
The paragraph immediately before that term is used talks about a natural fermentation process similar to the one that produces yeast and lactic acid bacteria which provides context for the single-cell protein concept.
single-cell protein, also called single-celled protein (for example https://scialert.net/fulltextmobile/?doi=ajft.2011.103.116 uses both), refers to the process of producing the protein using unicellular (or "single-celled") organisms rather than implying that the protein is composed of cells (or of single-cell organisms).
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 [2] http://calysta.com/feedkind/ [3] http://nouritech.net/feedkind/