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The simplest way to think about it is to remember that conservation of energy means you can’t get free energy.
Carbon dioxide is the resulting product of combining carbon with oxygen–a process we normally associate with combustion. For octane (the good part of gasoline) you take 25 O2 + 2 C8H18 ==> 16 CO2 + 18 H2O, and the reaction produces 46.7 megajoules of energy per liter. You can’t split the CO2 and H2O and turn them back into oxygen and octane without putting in more energy than the energy it released when you combined them.
So if you want to make a liter of octane (C8H18) from atmospheric CO2 and H2O, it requires more than 46.7 megajoules of energy. It has to. No free energy.
The most anyone can ever do is convert energy plus matter into a different form to store the energy chemically. The trick lies in finding the combination of a convenient-to-handle compound that’s stable at room temperatures and pressures, with an efficient process. And hopefully is not too toxic. Or too polluting when burned. Or can be used as a weapon. And is inexpensive. And doesn’t require catalysts that are only found at the bottoms of open pit mines on the surface of the moon. And doesn’t emit radiation.
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A handy conversion factor I keep in my head is that a litre of gasoline has about the same energy as a couple sticks of dynamite. So that’s a lot of energy to push into CO2.
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It is now - thank goodness. The original margarine was made from beef fat which didn’t need hydrogenation. It was growing demand that forced the use of vegetable oil as a partial or total substitute for animal fats which was made possible by the development of the Sabatier Process of hydrogenation.
The demand for fats for margarine was one of the big drivers for the exploitation of the Antarctic whaling population by European fleets in the early and mid 20th Century, but even that wasn’t enough - a German margarine made from waxes derived from distilling coal was sold during the 1930s.
The history of margarine is surprisingly fascinating. Pressure from the Wisconsin dairy farmers led to the outlawing of the sale of yellow margarine in the US for fear people might think it was butter. Manufacturers started supplying a small packet of yellow food colouring with each sale that the user would mash into the white waxy margarine to make it look even vaguely appealing.
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But she’s not smiling these days.
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Ok, got it. Space butter.
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Gates claims Savor’s thermochemical process uses less than one-thousandth of the water used in traditional agriculture.
Freeing the resource up to provide cooling for AIs.
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Disclaimer: I’m a silly old man.
Couldn’t help but thinking that Mayo might have a conflict of interests here…
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What does the Aioli Institute have to say?
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Don’t listen to them, they’re just controlled by big oil.
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Nah, that’s Soylent Green.
Hmm so I better not start up a butter sequestering company.
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Let’s hope not - this Floridian would be first on the list to try something like that here!
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Well they’ve already banned synthetic meat. I don’t know why they wouldn’t ban synthetic butter.
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hence the hoping part.
I’m curious to see if this “cooks” like butter or not.
Back in Canada our default (non-cooking) fat was a lower-calorie, non-hydoginated plant sterol-filled non-palm-oil-based product from Becel, but there’s no really good equivalent here (at least not locally in supermarkets) so our “light” option has been a concoction of butter whipped with canola oil that’s lower calorie, and then a good cultured butter for cooking (what’s with Americans and sweet cream butter, anyway?).
For me, anyway, the utility of this sort of product would depend a lot on the effect it had being cooked into a recipe, assuming the calorie count is similar to actual butter.
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Yeah, if it cooks like butter, and tastes like butter, and isn’t worse for you than butter, and the production has a lower environmental impact than butter production, we should get all over this. I’m still waiting for a sugar substitute that bakes like sugar and doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. Swerve is pretty good, unless you try to make frosting with it.
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I remember hearing a while back about the stereoisomer of sugar being a possibility. IIRC at that time it was something like $80K/lb, so not economical as a substitute. Is that yet another thing that just petered out?
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