You frame it like it's a bad thing but even if the process is mostly the same isn't that good? Also we can clearly improve on a 100 year old technology even if it's "solved".

You're right, but I am curious whether they'll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.

And they're specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they're looking for.

It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I'm not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.

Yes, they aren't trying to make an alternative butter substitute as I understand it. They're trying to make real butter via a purely chemically synthetic process.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).

This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.

Both of those things are basically C, H, and O.

I mean, it was backed by Bill Gates, mr proprietary himself

The basic process is not proprietary. It's just the Fischer-Tropsch process. It's been in use since WWII. It produces hydrocarbon chains of arbitrary length from whatever hydrocarbon feedstock you can provide.

Dietary fats are just certain short-chained hydrocarbons accompanied by certain flavorful compounds.

The "proprietary" part is what chemicals they add to the synthesized fat to make it sufficiently comparable to butter.

The Nazis used the same basic process to produce "butter" from coal feedstocks about 90 years ago. This is nothing new.

It is neither plant or animal based, the chemical composition is claimed to be like butter, so it is even less margarine than it is butter. Margarine is hardened plant oil or technically it can also be made from animal fat. So this is neither margarine or butter, it is synthetic butter, since it synthesized chemically, rather than made by the traditional more natural method.

But yes capitalism indeed. Why try to help the world if you can't make money on it? 🙄

proprietary process

Where the carbon is replaced with butter.

I can't believe it's not butter

I shall add some potassium and market it as buttOCK

Maybe they add some of those under "natural flavors"?

I'm not sure why people are so puritanical about this. I think Beyond Burgers and Soylent are great.

I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. Current food sector is rotten to the core. For most, food is entertainment that is incredibly inefficient at what it does and causes incredible ethical harms that we choose to conciously ignore.

Space Butter

"Soylent Green is people!"

Bring me the corpse starch

but also in this case we already have perfectly fucking fine margerine, if you splurge on slightly more expensive (which is still like half the fucking price of butter) stuff it'll taste pretty damn close to butter so long as you're not doing a side by side comparison.

No the most important question is how much energy does it take?

It takes a lot, but not nearly enough.

The real problem with solar generation is seasonal variation. Think about the generation capacity we need during a 9-hour, overcast, winter day. Now, think about that same array under clear summer skies, when we are getting 15 hours of daylight.

It's barely meeting demamd in winter, but it is producing 4-10 times as much power as we actually need in summer. Grid storage is the usual suggestion for mitigating the limitations of solar generation, but no amount of grid storage is feasible for leveling seasonal variations.

Energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch technology could soak up that excess summer power production, and shit off for the winter, making it profitable to deploy those large solar arrays. But we don't consume nearly enough butter to make this a viable approach at mitigating seasonal variation. To make it useful for promoting solar rollouts, we would need to be producing jet fuel, not butter.

“Other assorted stuff”? The palm oil probably isn’t great, of course it’s simple existence is causing the intentional destruction of important forests and it, and the people who use it, can fuck right off, but otherwise I dunno, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world.

I think health on cheese a pretty low bar to beat tho

So, it's probably more healthy then, with unsaturated fatty acids?

Did you eat your butter quota today? Do your part!

I assume we sequester it when we poop? I don't know what we do with human waste sludge. And I'm not sure I'm brave enough to google for myself.

Yes, but made in a factory instead of a cow.

He's also on the Eipstein list.

but it comes from the nipples of perpetually impregnated and enslaved creatures so I guess guilt-free carbons?

Typically there are minor 'impurities' that make the 'real' thing taste different.
Vanillin, for example, is very easy to produce chemically, which is good, because growing and harvesting it naturally is very difficult, but it's missing a lot of the compounds which add subtle yet important taste and smell to the natural stuff.

That’s what I’m thinking. For example, there are milk proteins in butter that undergo the Maillard reaction to produce different flavors. Will this product have the same proteins?

Especially tea

I'm watching you, Dent