Farming is devastating the planet. But there could be a much more environmentally friendly way to feed ourselves: using renewable energy to turn carbon dioxide into food.
“This is becoming a reality,” says Pasi Vainikka at Solar Foods. The company is building the first commercial-scale factory, near Helsinki in Finland, that will be able to make food directly from CO2. It will produce 100 tonnes per year, enough for 4 or 5 million meals, he says. “We are a bit behind schedule, but production may start just about in 2023,” says Vainikka.
Advertisement
There can be no doubt about the need to find greener ways to grow food. Conventional agriculture – including organic farming – causes damage to the environment in many ways. It requires a lot of land, leading to habitat loss and deforestation, and often needs vast amounts of water, which can result in lakes and rivers drying up. It is also the source of a third of all greenhouse gas emissions and releases other pollutants, such as the nitrates that create dead zones in lakes and oceans.
It isn’t very efficient, either. Crops typically convert less than 1 per cent of light energy into usable biomass. Feeding plants to animals to produce meat is less efficient still.
Instead, Solar Foods plans to bypass photosynthesis altogether, and grow .
At the factory, renewable electricity will be used to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be added to large vats, where the bacteria grow, along with CO2 and ammonia to provide carbon and nitrogen respectively. Some of the CO2 will be captured directly from the air at a visitors’ centre at the factory, Vainikka says, and the rest will come from industrial sources.
The end result will be a yellow powder called Solein that is made of bacterial cells and is up to 70 per cent protein. It can be used as an ingredient in all kinds of foods, from meat alternatives to cereals and snacks. For instance, it can replace eggs in noodles and pasta. “We are aiming at replacing animal-sourced proteins, which we think have the highest environmental impact,” says Vainikka.
Solein was in October 2022, and Solar Foods is awaiting approval in the UK, the European Union and the US.
Compared with plant crops, Solein will use 100 times less water per kilogram of protein produced, 20 times less land – including the land used for energy production – and emit a fifth as much CO2, according to Solar Foods. Compared with beef, a kilogram of protein can be produced using 600 times less water and 200 times less land, again counting the land used for energy production, while emitting 200 times less CO2, says the company.
There are other benefits, too: factories could be situated anywhere in the world and production won’t be affected by weather extremes.
“With Solar Foods and other companies scaling up their systems, this is truly ushering in a new era of agriculture,” says Dorian Leger at Connectomix Bio in Germany. “I think these trends are exciting and will lead to improved global food security and help bending the carbon curve.”
Sign up to our free Fix the Planet newsletter to get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday
