A company in Batavia, Illinois is making butter in a way you've never seen before. No animals, no plants, no oils; this butter is made from carbon.

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.

  • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1414·
    10 days ago

    If it’s not dairy, is this not margarine rather than butter?

    Also, a

    proprietary process

    Ugh, capitalism

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
      311·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        but also we already have margarine that tastes close enough to butter, so this thing is at best “hey guys we made margerine taste slightly more like butter”

        the brand i’ve used which is very butter-like just adds some sort of field bean extract and some orange food colouring lmao

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      213·
      10 days ago

      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? 🙄