Bill Gates backs startup to make fake butter from CO2; it could pave the way for food without farming

Bill Gates backs startup to make fake butter from CO2; it could pave the way for food without farming

Rhoda Wilson

A Bill Gates-backed startup Savor says its synthetic “vegan” fat, made without livestock or the crops needed for margarine, could cut carbon emissions and save rainforests.  However, no information is given on the nutritional value of or unwanted chemicals contained within the fake fat.  They seem to be missing the point, perhaps deliberately so, that food is supposed to be nutritious.

A new type of dietary fat could soon be on sale in the US as researchers and entrepreneurs race to develop the first synthetic “foods.”

According to New Scientist, US startup Savor has created a “butter” product made from carbon, in a thermochemical system closer to fossil fuel processing than food production. “There is no biology involved in our specific process,” says Kathleen Alexander from the company.

In a Substack article published in December 2023, Alexander wrote: “The fats we make at Savor can be produced from fossil fuels like natural gas or from captured CO2 and green hydrogen … We could not be more excited to bring these new fats to the world.”

Savor calls them “zero carbon fats” and “carbon neutral fats.”  They don’t get the irony.

How Does Savor Make Zero Carbon Fats?

“The Californian startup has gone to the basics of chemistry to build its product. According to its website, like any molecule, fat also has a fixed chemical formula. It uses carbon dioxide as a starting point to build fat molecules using heat and hydrogen,”  Interesting Engineering explained without giving further details, which is not surprising as Savor’s website doesn’t seem to have any. 

However, we were able to find some details about their process in a presentation given at the Good Food Institute conference held in September 2023.  In a session titled ‘Commercial innovation of alternative fat ingredients’, Savor’s Director of Business Development Chiara Cecchini presented the diagram below to show the process they use to make the synthetic fats that they want us to eat.

Notice the input begins with paraffin wax and CO2.  Cecchini explained: “We start from an input which is basically CO2 and green hydrogen in the form of paraffin and then we take those paraffin waxes and we basically oxidise them.”

Who Has Invested in Savor?

Bill Gates for one.

In a blog post that reads like a love letter to “the greasy, oily sizzle” that makes cheeseburgers so tasty, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft described why his venture capital company, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (“BEV”), invested in Savor.

“The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does. And most important, it tastes really good–like the real thing, because chemically it is,” he wrote.

According to Pitchbook, Savor has raised more than $33 million to date from BEV and other venture capital companies including Climate Capital and CPT Capital.

Read more: This Bill Gates-Backed Startup Is Making ‘Butter’ From CO2 Instead of Cows, Inc., 9 July