Food from Thin Air

From this:

It’s not like you can make food out of thin air. Well…it turns out you can. A company from Finland, Solar Foods, is planning to bring to market a new protein powder, Solein, made out of CO₂, water and electricity. It’s a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs. It reportedly looks and tastes like wheat flour, and could become an ingredient in a wide variety of food products after its initial launch in 2021.

There is no reason this can’t happen, but there is certainly a reason it won’t, and that is the cost of energy.

Just like all the various concepts for synthetic fuels, if you rearrange the atoms in CO2 and water, you have the potential to wind up with hydrocarbons and carbohydrates.  Add in nitrogen, which composes 78% of our atmosphere, and it’s theoretically possible to build proteins.

The issue, again, is that all these processes are highly endothermic, meaning that huge amounts of energy are required to make them happen.

Concepts like lab-grown meat (aka “meat without slaughter”) are far more feasible, in that they start with actual animal proteins.