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.
The Fischer-Tropsch process can be uses to produce any hydrocarbon product. We don’t use enough butter for it to feasibly soak up excess solar generation in the summer.
But we do use enough jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.
Thats not an assumption. That is the specific problem we need to overcome for solar to replace coal and nuclear. Already, we have summer, daytime generation rates going negative because we have not adequately adapted to the seasonal variation in solar. Those negative rates are massively hurting solar rollouts around the world.
We need massive, seasonal electrical loads to make solar profitable during spring/summer/autumn, so that we have sufficient generation capacity available through winter.
Storage is important for matching the daily generation curve to the daily demand curve, but we can’t hope to match seasonal variation. It would be easier to shift power across the equator than to build out enough storage to solve the seasonal variation problem.