All-American Startup Making "Butter" From Carbon in our Atmosphere

"There is no biology involved in our specific process."

Spreading Success

What would cuisines the world over be without butter? This isn't just a hypothetical — or a paean to the creamy fat. The outsized environmental impact of dairy (and cattle) farming means that we need to be seriously considering the place our favorite foods will have in a more climate-conscious future.

And to that dilemma, a US-based startup called Savor says it has a tantalizing solution that almost sounds too good to be true: a butter-like product that's made from the very CO2 that's heating our planet.

"There is no biology involved in our specific process," Savor chief technology officer Kathleen Alexander told New Scientist.

Acquired Taste

There's no shortage of butter substitutes out there, but few of them can claim to fight climate change. Savor says it uses a petrochemical process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to eventually turn stuff like carbon dioxide, methane, and coal into hydrocarbons.

Those hydrocarbons, in turn, can be infused with oxygen to make fatty acids and then fat. From there, Alexander explained to New Scientist, you add it to water, an emulsifier, and some rosemary oil to give the blend a "grassy" taste.

And voilà: you have 'butter' — thus future-proofing croissants, tasty restaurant vegetables, and whatever else requires obscene amounts of the stuff to satisfy our fat-lovin' taste buds for generations to come.

To kill two birds with one stone, this process could be fed by carbon captured from our atmosphere and powered with renewables so that humanity, in a sense, can eat our way out of our fossil fuel problem.

Better Yet...

The ambitions of Savor's scientists go beyond butter, however. They posit that processes like this could eventually be used to revolutionize agriculture as we know it. This is explored in an article, titled "Food Without Agriculture," published last year in the journal Nature Sustainability, that was authored by several of the startup's researchers, including Alexander.

"I don't think we will get to the point where we are making all our food synthetically, but if we could make a dent in it by synthesizing things like these otherwise quite-greenhouse-gas-intensive oil crops such as palm oil and soybeans, we could really reduce the amount of land that we need for our food supply," Steven Davis at Stanford University and lead author of the study, told New Scientist.

And in a "Soylent Green"-ish sounding future, the researchers also suggest that in the face of global food shortages, these high-calorie synthesized fats could hold us over.

"If we had an emergency, this could feed the whole planet for a really long time," Alexander told New Scientist.

Maybe so. But Savor's butter will have to overcome the obstacles plaguing other synthetic foods, like lab-grown meats, which are both enormously expensive to produce and are a difficult sell to the public. The company is adamant, however, that it can compete with the cost of real butter.

More on carbon: Scientists Say New Material Can Suck Carbon Out of Atmosphere Faster Than Trees