Making Food Out of Air
Theoretically impossible? No. Totally unfeasible? Only if you object to paying $200,000 for a loaf of bread.
There is no reason you can’t take the CO2 of the air, add water and energy, and synthesize ingestible carbohydrates. One thing you’re going to run into, of course, is that the atmosphere is 0.04 CO2, meaning that it’s 99.96% something else.
At first glance, this may sound similar to Windfuels, the concept I promote that synthesizes liquid fuels from CO2. There are three important differences, however:
• Windfuels contemplates point sources of CO2, e.g., coal and concrete plants, that are approximately 1000 times higher CO2 concentrations than that of our atmosphere.
• The fuel produced has a far higher market value.
• The process is carbon neutral, meaning that it greatly reduces the amount of carbon released into our atmosphere per mile driven/flown.
Ideas in cleantech are a dime a dozen. The problem: good ideas aren’t.
I do think that synthesized meat will be the majority of meat intake by the end of my lifetime, because there will be more political activism in terms of eliminating animal slaughter if a reasonable approximate is available at similar costs.
🙂
But for vegetables and grains, agriculture is simply too easy. I suspect, and hope, that more and more agriculture will move indoors over the next 30 years. It only makes sense, and it will make more sense as water strain is more greatly appreciated. But I cannot imagine synthesized corn meal ever being on economic parity with corn grown in a field, or corn grown in a 10-story warehouse, with 10 stacked ranks of corn rows under full spectrum LED’s.