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.
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.
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.
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
It’s like a very limited Star Trek replicator. It can make anything you want as long as it’s butter.
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.
To be honest, people probably cause more environmental damage from releasing methane after eating butter. Lol
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).
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.
I definitely understand that. My commentary is mostly satire based in fact. Hence the FBI at the end.
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.
Wait. So a “butter star” is possible?
Once one is discovered, there will be a NASA mission to bake a gigantic loaf of bread and launch it at the butter star.
And Musky’ll have a tantrum trying to race a croissant at it first.
Is it as bad for your health as hydrogenated oils?
Even if it is – I’m interested in seeing how it performs. Feed some rats 3-5x the recommended amount, see what happens. Have some long term studies.
If it is the same as what we use, right now, for a lessened cost or environmental impact, that is still worth exploring.
Guarantee that A) it doesn’t taste just like real butter, and B) it’ll make you shit yourself and bring a return of the label “may cause anal leakage”.
Does that mean it’s not a potentially viable product? No, it doesn’t. But let’s not bullshit.
I get sick everytime I eat meat from Walmart. I fear bill gates butter will kill me.
The problem with Olestra (the anal leakage oil alternative) is it’s a mixture of hexa-, hepta-, and octa-esters of sucrose with various long chain fatty acids. The resulting radial arrangement is too large and irregular to move through the intestinal wall and be absorbed into the bloodstream.
What Savor has supposedly created is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not made of new compounds, but made in a new way.
What’s up with people talking about shitting themselves?
There was a run of fat replacement back (iirc) in the late nineties. Olestra was one of the name brands.
It wouldn’t digest at all, and it also wouldn’t mix in happily with the rest of the body waste in the colon. Hence, anal leakage becoming a phrase you would see on food labels.
And you would, sometimes, have not only leakage, but diarrhea. Sometimes violent diarrhea.
Basically, the oil was slippery enough to escape the anus no matter how tight it was. And there was a lot of it, under pressure from other waste behind it.
We’re in the presence of masters of the art of shitting one’s self
Interesting way to get fat alternatives, people are already used to eating fake butter regularly, so it probably wouldn’t take much to add this to our diet.
It’s also closer to butter than butter alternatives. It’s not made to be more healthy, just more planet friendly.
Fake food is going to be more healthy than the real deal?
Sure buddy
I wrote it’s not made to be more healthy, because that’s the current marketing of butter alternatives. This isn’t claiming to be more healthy. The compounds are the same as the fatty acids in butter.
It’s simply a way to get butter while reducing carbon dioxide, rather than increasing it.
Fake medicine is going to be more healthy than the real (plant) deal? Sure buddy.
If it’s chemically identical, what does it matter if it’s come from dairy, this process, or a Star Trek replicator?
This fallacy is called an appeal to nature.
It is also a fact that butter is a staple food that has been used for thousands of years with a proven track record.
This may be a logical fallacy known as false equivalence, when one fact is stated or implied to be conflated with another not directly related fact.
This fallacy is called an appeal to tradition.
Just because something is fallacy the way it was presented does not make it wrong if he facts check out :)
Your facts don’t check out, that’s what makes you wrong. Fallacies are just the symptom.
It’s not made to be more healthy, just more planet friendly.
Good or bad, it’s still processed food.
That’s my half-assed neutral statement. I choose not to eat processed foods. As long as there’s disclosure, I don’t care.
What people eat or don’t eat is their business.
They said it’s NOT made to be more healthy.
It won’t be, it’s processed shite
OKAY
So is any meat, mayonnaise, even butter is processed. Ever went into a fast food chain? Most ingredients are processed to the bits.
You better not take any medicine, that super processed? And Coca cola or any energy drinks? Bleh, made in labs!
I guess you only eat whole grains collected by you, that must suck.
Dam y’all really getting bent on shape over this lol
Sounds like margarine with more chances to shit myself
I think it’s closer to the coal butter synthesis but maybe they found a more efficient method using other carbon sources
The process required at least 60 kilograms of coal per kilogram of synthetic butter.
Carbo-LEO.
“You see, we take all that bad stuff we learned from Oleo pantshitting technology, and then we move it around. Now we have ‘Carbo-LEO’'.”
Found the guy who failed high school chemistry.
I see you didn’t read the article
Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.
You are absolutely wrong.
Margarine is made of hydrogenated oil. This is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not an alternative for dietary purposes, it’s just a more planet friendly solution.
actual margarine is getting hard to find in stores around here, and when you do it’s priced almost as high as a non-sale price of real butter. margarine has 80% fat content and similar baking and cooking properties as butter.
what’s on store shelves is a cheapened, watered down product laced with extra chemicals and fillers, ranging from 25-40% oil and can’t even make a proper box of mac & cheese. some of them don’t even melt when put on toast, hot, right from the toaster.
Yeah we already been through this bull shit.
No, duck u corpo daddy.
So they invented another kind of margarine.
No, they invited another kind of cow.
Did the cow accept their invitation?
Don’t want to be a hater but doesn’t this basically create fat without nutrients? It feels like this is reinventing margarine albeit in a cool way.
They’re the same fatty acids found in butter. Margarine is hydrogenated oil.
They’re from the same class yes, but is it also going to contain vitamins A, D, E and K2 or contain fatty acids like Conjugated Linoleic Acid or Butyric acid?
I’m trying to point out that factory produced fats will most likely lose out on the health benefits of butter as a source of fatty acids.
They will “enrich it” like the do with bread and other highly processed product with non bio digestable supplements for propaganda purposes.
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.
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 tho 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.
finally someone did the thing everybody wanted
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.
During WW2, due to the food shortage, Germans did this using the carbon from coal… The process is old and known.
https://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.
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.
It is just regular margarine, and for me, it is inedible. Tastes like vaseline.
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.
“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?
“I can’t believe it’s not chemically manufactured butter!”
~I can’t believe it’s not~ BUTTER
Hey, I like margarine…
Give me Kerry Gold or give me death
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.
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.
