Bill Gates supports a company that is said to have created butter made of CO₂! Yeah! Literally using CO₂, water and hydrogen. This innovation wants to change the way in which we produce food making it cleaner, more sustainable, and without the need to depend on animals or farmland. So, let’s learn more about the idea Bill Gates thinks it’s good.
What has the company exactly made?
The company is called Savor and it’s part of the project Orca Sciences. This company says it has developed synthetic butter created in a lab without cows, no agriculture, and without using farmland. Basically, the process is: capturing CO₂ from the air, using water and hydrogen.
With these elements the company can start an advanced biochemical process that transforms these ingredients into edible fats. These fats are chemically identical to natural fats. This means the butter created by Savor has the same molecular structure as regular butter.
That’s why the company (and Bill Gates) say it tastes exactly like the real thing.
Why Bill Gates supports this butter
Bill Gates is one of the biggest investors in Savor and he explains that this technology can help a lot on our planet. According to him, this way of producing fats:
- Does not release greenhouse gases.
- Uses less than one-thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture needs.
- Is sustainable.
- Could eventually be produced at a large scale.
For Gates, this is a way to create food that’s ‘’sustainable, scalable, and delicious.’’ What’s more, he insists on the butter created by Savor to ‘’taste as good as the real one because chemically it is.’’
So, this is not a substitutive, this is not margarine or a plant-based imitation. It is real butter, only made through a different process.
Make food without farmlands
The Savor project doesn’t want to make just butter, its vision is wider: create food without using farmlands. This means:
- No cows needed for milk or fat.
- No huge fields for crops.
- No deforestation for palm oil.
- No dependence on weather or climate.
- Much lower emissions.
The company is also developing:
- Fats similar to meat fats.
- Fats like those found in milk.
- Substitutes for palm oil (one of the biggest causes of deforestation).
They call this vision “farm-free food,” using clean chemistry and precise scientific methods to create foods without harming nature.
The science behind the project
A study published in the Nature Sustainability magazine supports this idea. Researchers from the University of California in Irvine proved that fats created in labs can be produced with:
- Less than one-third of the emissions produced by traditional farming.
- Far less water usage.
- A much smaller environmental impact.
Issues about this technology
The only big current challenge about this idea supported by Bill Gates is the cost because producing these fats is still very expensive, since the technology is very recent. However, researchers believe that:
- Large-scale production will reduce costs.
- Fat molecules are relatively simple to produce because “it’s all chemistry”.
- High temperature and pressure methods can make the process very efficient.
If they achieve to lower the costs, the impact on food production would be huge.
A step into the food of the future
As you have read, this isn’t just a new type of butter. It’s a glimpse into a future where our food is cleaner, smarter, and kinder to the planet — a future quite literally made from the air around us. Can you imagine eating this kind of butter? Many people follow what Bill Gates says because they consider him a genius, so many people might be willing to try it. We’ll see if this will have a good welcome among the public.