Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days agoSome, as prepping the carbon and hydrogen will take energy. But it wouldn’t be hard to be way better than the emissions associated with dairy farming for butter. Cost could still be higher, though depending on how much material is needed for the process.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I wonder where they source the methane from. Because I pictured a comicbook flip book of a balloon blowing up behind a cow
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Methane is easy to produce. Basically, anything that rots produces methane.
They didn’t go into details, and I never took chemistry, but they may not even need methane. From my very basic understanding of chemical chains, triglycerides are made from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and methane is hydrogen and carbon. So you could theoretically convert methane to triglycerides by combining w/ oxygen, but you could also do the same by extracting carbon and oxygen from CO2 and oxygen and hydrogen from water.
Fertilizers are typically generated from natural gas (methane), but green ammonia exists and is produced from air and water and can replace the fossil fuels in fertilizer production. The same could absolutely make sense here.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Methane is just the primary compound in natural gas.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I mean they can get it from the ground, but it can also come from things kind of fermenting in cows/our stomachs.