CNN
—
It was house journey that impressed scientist Lisa Dyson to create an uncommon local weather resolution: protein created from air, which could be grown inside a tank as an alternative of utilizing up priceless land.
Dyson is the founding father of Air Protein, a California-based startup that’s harnessing cutting-edge expertise to create a meat different known as Air Meat, utilizing simply microbes, water, renewable vitality and components discovered within the air.
Launched in 2019, Dyson primarily based the expertise on analysis carried out by NASA within the Nineteen Sixties, which explored methods to feed astronauts on lengthy missions to Mars. One proposal was to make meals by combining microbes with the carbon dioxide (CO2) that the astronauts had been respiration out, however the thought was by no means realized by NASA.
“We’re leveraging these preliminary ideas NASA had and choosing them up off the shelf,” Dyson says.
Air Protein’s course of is much like yogurt or cheese fermentation. However as an alternative of feeding sugar or milk to the microbe cultures, CO2, nitrogen and oxygen are whisked by giant fermentation tanks, the place the tradition produces proteins inside hours. These proteins are harvested, dried and made right into a flour which can be utilized to provide a steak substitute by including flavorings and vitamins.
Dyson’s driving power is her need to sort out local weather change. “NASA scientists all the time assume in a different way and if we’re going to do one thing revolutionary and new about local weather change, we now have to assume in a different way,” she says.
The truth of the local weather disaster hit Dyson when she visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “Simply seeing the devastation of that occasion and enthusiastic about how local weather scientists have been warning us that these climate occasions are going to turn out to be extra frequent and extra intense – I wished to be part of the answer,” she says.
Dyson, who has a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, determined to concentrate on the meals trade as a result of “it produces extra greenhouse gases than the whole transportation sector.”
The worldwide meals trade contributes round 17.3 billion metric tons of CO2 equal emissions per 12 months, nearly 19 occasions the quantity produced by worldwide aviation and 35% of all human-caused emissions, based on a research by the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign within the US.
Farming animals is chargeable for 14.5% of the worldwide carbon footprint and the manufacturing of purple meat accounts for 41% of these emissions, based on the United Nations Meals and Agricultural Group.
With the worldwide inhabitants predicted to succeed in 9.8 billion by 2050, meat consumption is predicted to extend considerably, and feeding that many individuals utilizing typical strategies would require huge swathes of land.
“The place are we going to get all of the arable land from?” says Dyson. “How will we make all that meals with out rising greenhouse gases, and basically overheating the planet increasingly?”
Air Protein has created “a brand new kind of agriculture and a brand new approach of rising meals that doesn’t require arable land,” Dyson says.
The corporate says it has not but revealed the outcomes of its lifecycle evaluation, however claims it doesn’t add any emissions to the ambiance. It produces oxygen and nitrogen from air utilizing renewable vitality, and sources CO2 from industrial suppliers, with plans to ultimately use direct air seize to attract CO2 down from the ambiance.
Making meat substitutes from biomass fermentation isn’t new – Quorn, derived from a fungus, additionally makes use of fermentation and was launched within the Nineteen Eighties. Different startups, similar to Finland’s Photo voltaic Meals, have been growing methods to gas the same course of to Air Protein’s utilizing air and renewable vitality.
Proteins produced utilizing biomass fermentation are “extremely nutritious, wealthy in fiber in addition to protein, and require little additional processing,” says Robert Lawson, managing accomplice at Meals Technique Associates, a consultancy for the meals trade.
“Their purposes aren’t restricted to meat options – they could possibly be changed into nutritious protein shakes or into ice lotions,” he says.
One of many largest challenges corporations similar to Air Protein face is competing with the normal meat trade, which is closely backed, Lawson says.
“To succeed in pricing parity with meat would require scaling up of infrastructure – so possibly when biomass fermentation is 10-20 occasions the dimensions it’s right this moment there will probably be extra scale economies,” he says.
Corporations that use this new expertise additionally face “the problem of explaining to customers what fermented proteins are and why they may need to eat them,” says Lawson.
Air Protein raised $32 million final 12 months and can announce when it plans to start out promoting merchandise within the US subsequent 12 months. It says it’s “close to the tip of the regulatory necessities course of” and has “checked off all the proper bins to date.” Air Protein didn’t give a sign of the retail value, however Dyson stated that manufacturing prices will fall as “renewable vitality turns into increasingly plentiful.”
The corporate will probably be coming into the market at a time when the plant-based meat trade is going through difficulties in the USA. Shares of Past Meat are down greater than 75% this 12 months, and a current report from Deloitte famous that gross sales of meat substitutes had been “stagnating,” with customers battling excessive inflation and questioning the assumed advantages of the merchandise.
Air Protein can be engaged on creating scallop protein, however its essential focus is the meat trade. “We’re specializing in that first, however [the technology] may be very versatile to faucet into many various meals teams, together with cheese and fish,” says Dyson.
“We have to produce meals in a approach that isn’t suffocating the planet,” she says. “We don’t have a alternative. I feel there’s a brilliant future after we deliver innovation to the equation and alter how our meals is made.”
