But first it'll have to prove its business model:
We've spent the last century and a half pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it's clear that we'll have to spend the coming decades removing a significant fraction of that.
But then what do we do with it all? Some people are proposing pumping it underground. Others think we can make things from it, including liquid fuels and concrete. Problem is, those are pretty low-margin opportunities today. One startup thinks the answer is to turn carbon dioxide into protein.
[...] NovoNutrients relies on bacteria to do the dirty work. The company has surveyed the scientific literature to find species that can use carbon dioxide in their metabolic pathways, allowing them to use the waste gas as energy. Its scientists have also discovered strains not otherwise known to science.
"Our technology is about how do you industrialize this naturally occurring metabolism?" CEO David Tze told TechCrunch+.
[...] The company's approach has several advantages over other methods of using carbon dioxide. For one thing, it does not require large amounts of land or water, which are both in short supply in many parts of the world. It also does not require the use of fossil fuels, which are a major contributor to climate change.
NovoNutrients is not the only company working on using carbon dioxide to create protein. Other companies, such as Calysta and Deep Branch Biotechnology, are also developing similar technologies. However, NovoNutrients believes that its approach is unique because it uses bacteria to create protein products that are high in quality and can be sold at a competitive price.
The company's pilot-scale plant will be located in California and is expected to be operational by the end of 2021 [sic]. If successful, NovoNutrients plans to build a larger commercial-scale plant that could produce up to 1,000 metric tons of protein per year.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Monday April 17, @07:50AM (1 child)
CO2 is an incredibly stable molecule. Breaking that up takes enormous amounts of power. There is a reason why burning stuff releases such vast amounts of energy, guess where that energy comes from. C'mon, basic chemistry and a bit of conservation of energy and you should get the idea easily. TANSTAAFL applies to physics. If you want to break up CO2, you have to put into it the same amount of energy (actually, due to entropy, even more) as was released when that carbon was oxidized (i.e. "burned").
Now they want to add N2 to the mix. I frankly don't know whether breaking THAT apart wouldn't even require MORE energy. N2 has a triple bond. Again, there's a reason why those Nitrogen compounds are so insanely volatile and cause so much havoc when they react and form N2. Take a wild guess what gets released when this happens. And what you have to pump into the N2 to break it up again.
Now they say that "bacteria are gonna do the dirty work". And those bacteria can somehow violate the laws of thermodynamics? Or where do they get that vast amount of energy from?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Monday April 17, @08:55AM
Yeah - you can't really use CO2 or N2 as energy sources. Not to produce any of the much-higher-energy molecules we consume as nutrients.
As raw materials though, definitely - plants (very inefficiently) use sunlight to turn CO2 into sugar and cellulose, and usually "trade" some of the sugar to soil bacteria who can convert atmospheric N2 into more useful compounds like ammonia.
And that's what it sounds like they're actually doing, so I'm betting that using CO2 for energy is a typo on the part of the article author. (Or comprehension failure - reporters are notoriously terrible with science)
Their website (https://www.novonutrients.com/) says they use CO2 and hydrogen as their primary inputs, which works out nicely since hydrogen is extremely energy rich in addition to being a valuable raw material. The accompanying picture suggest they use (renewable) electricity to produce the hydrogen, which could easily be more efficient than most plants, and can, if done right, have a massively lower environmental impact than traditional agriculture.
NASA did a bunch of research back in the ... 70's(?) on using hydrogen-eating microbes as food for long-term space missions, and there have been several companies in the last decades looking to commercialize the technology for terrestrial use. Sugar, starch, protein powder, oil - all the major highly-processed ingredients could instead be sourced from microbes and who would know the difference?
Depending on the microbes, you might not even need to do anything beyond drying them to get a viable ingredient, which could potentially reduce a lot of the health issues that seem to be tied to heavily processed foods, as well as increasing the profitability.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Username on Monday April 17, @08:58AM
NovoNutrients is PEOPLE!
(Score: 3, Touché) by BsAtHome on Monday April 17, @09:04AM (1 child)
Reinventing plants as a way to remove CO2?
That is like saying we need to destroy our environment to protect our environment.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday April 17, @06:52PM
A line from Only Yesterday (FL Allen) [mcgrewbooks.com]: "It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict―in a very literal sense, a reign of terror."
The early 1920s. People never change, and seldom think.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday April 17, @01:55PM (1 child)
This doesn't sound to me like a way to address the CO2 problem. Proteins tend to get eaten by something, and converted back to CO2. Converting it to graphene is more reasonable, and even that probably isn't economic.
The problem is all the stuff that used to be buried in rocks (coal, oil, etc.) and is now floating around in the atmosphere. I don't think there's ANY way to economically remove it. E.g. it would take more plants than can fit on the surface of the earth, and then the stuff wouldn't stay gone very long. Plastic is actually a better answer (though that's got it's own problems).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday April 17, @02:36PM
It's definitely not an effective way to sequester carbon; however, it is a carbon-neutral replacement for a big chunk of the high-carbon agricultural industry (petrochemicals are used extensively in both fuels and fertilizers).
It would also greatly reduce the need for agricultural land - much of which is dedicated to corn, wheat, and other cereals destined for heavy processing. And allowing agricultural land to lie fallow *is* a carbon sink - wild grasslands in particular can convert a huge amount of CO2 to soil - potentially producing several inches worth of new soil per year.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17, @11:25PM (4 children)
Nope. If we get CO2 back down to pre-industrial levels then most of the world starves. Higher CO2 promotes plant growth and reduces their need for water. If you dropped CO2 to 280ppm or so, many of the modern high yield crops would either fail completely or require massive amounts more of water and targeted herbicides.
I would agree that we need to slow down the production of CO2 to approximately the sequestration rate, but the optimum CO2 level for us, and the biosphere, is somewhere between 400 and 800ppm.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 18, @04:16PM (3 children)
Actually it's not nearly so simple - higher CO2 does make plants grow a little faster, but it also makes them less nutritious - all you're getting is more cellulose and sugar. To the point that the same plant will likely provide less total nutritional value even though it's larger.
Plus, there's zero risk of starvation because of food shortages - the world throws away more than half the food we grow. It's not even used as animal feed, just literally discarded to rot for various reasons at various stages of the production chain because it's not sufficienty profitable to do anything else.
Meanwhile global warming is going to absolutely destroy agriculture thanks to droughts, flooding, etc. We're seeing the first glimmers of the problem today, but even if we held CO2 emissions steady at today's levels the warming will continue for a century or so - the planet is a big place, significantly altering the planet's energy balance is going to take a long time to reach a new equilibrium.
And of course there's the tipping point to be concerned about. All of human civilization has taken place within a geologically brief interglacial period within a relatively brief 3 million year long ice age, starting with the birth of agriculture when the planet thawed about 14,000 years ago. And interglacial periods are NOT stable. Usually they end in the glaciers extending back down from the ice caps almost to the tropics, but they also set the stage for other disruptions to tip the balance back to the Earth's normal "hothouse" state, such as when the Dinosaurs roamed the earth. Where the ice caps melt completely, global temperatures rise by 10-20 degrees, and semi-tropical plants thrive above the the arctic circle.
Which, realistically, could be a good outcome in the long term. But the transitions are brutal - thousands of years of mass extinctions as ecosystems struggle to adapt to unstable, fast-changing climates. Humanity would almost certainly survive, but not in anything like our current numbers, and we'll probably spend a good 20 or so eating a lot of cockroaches before ecosystems recover anything like their current health and carrying capacity.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 18, @04:18PM (2 children)
Bah, talk about killing the finale. That last line should be:
Humanity would almost certainly survive, but not in anything like our current numbers, and we'll probably spend a good 20 or so generations eating a lot of cockroaches before ecosystems recover anything like their current health and carrying capacity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23, @11:36AM (1 child)
Nope, not 20 generations. More like 20 million years. This is the only chance for life to get off this rock for a long time. We've used up all the easy oil, but more importantly we've mined all the easy metals. If civilization falls now, the scavengers and survivalists will spiral down to the level of a hunter-gatherer society, and there won't be another industrial revolution until the continents turn over and the oil reserves refill.
It'll be a lot like fantasy settings actually, with powerful artifacts and mysterious metal objects waiting to be found in strange places, and legends of ancient beings of immense power who could fly around the world in a day, and kill a city in an instant.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday April 23, @01:28PM
Nah. We might never again be a spacefaring species, but we'll be eating well again long before then. It generally only takes a few (sometimes tens of) millenia for the planet to mostly recover from a major extinction event. 20M years is almost 1/3 of the way between today and the extinction of the dinosaurs - while mammals rose to become the dominant land animals long before then.
On a geologic timescale the bad period doesn't last long enough to be worth mentioning. But for those living through it... well the iron age has only lasted a few thousand years. Heck, agriculture and the rise of civilization only started 12-14 thousand years ago.
As for technology, we'll almost certainly retain at least relatively simple machines like steam engines, electric motors, wind + hydro power, etc. Things like computers and solar panels that require a long high-tech supply chain might be in danger, but it's unlikely we'll lose knowledge of basic physics, and we'll have massive deposits of refined ores to work with in ruins and landfills. Far more than needed for a vastly reduced population. If it's something that poor communities in Africa, etc. can cobbled together from spare parts today, it's unlikely it will be lost. Not with all the knowledge repositories scattered around the world - several specifically designed with the intent of surviving a nuclear holocaust or other collapse of civilization.