cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34272214
A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world’s first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.
The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.
Why not just make a fuel that can power cars if you’re gonna go this far.
cost :/ and low energy conversion efficiency. Whereas expensive novelty edibles may have a high price, fuels, not so much.
We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a “nice to have” while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.
It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it’s required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can’t be done because of “cost” or “efficiency”. When they do that they’re presupposing what the priority is, but often it’s billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it’s even the right choice.
@MuskyMelon @Gsus4 hydrogen probably… just need further development, I think we are in a technologic race, battery is still winning but it can change…
You can get a hydrogen car today. Just that if you’re outside a few places like Japan and California, finding a fueling station might be a bit difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#%2Ffind%2Fnearest%3Ffuel=HY
They do fuel up a lot faster than BEVs do, but the fuel cost is considerably higher than for BEVs.