What if food could be synthesized out of thin air, using thousands of times less land and water? Initially we’re talking proteins (complete proteins that could replace meat), but oils are also able to be produced. Proteins and oils are two of the three macronutrients the body needs (the other being carbohydrates). Solar Foods’ current billion-Euro 5-year planned Solein production facility in Finland would, at 50,000 tonnes of Solein per year, create as much protein as 29,300 hectares of soy beans. That’s equivalent to an area of 100% soy crop land of 17 square km.[1]
The promise is for people to come together to increase these numbers to a point where they lead to a largescale improvement in animal suffering, human nutrition and environmental impacts.
Context
Food is a basic need. Agriculture takes up 44% of habitable land.[2] The Earth’s population is about 8.2 billion people, expecting to rise by two billion people this century.
There’s a cost to this. As an example, the Ogallala Aquifer which underlies parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming in the United States, is drying up.[3] It supplies at least one-fifth of the total annual U.S. agricultural harvest.[4]
Opportunity
There’s also an opportunity to this. United States’ consumption of bread is 6.87 billion kg per year.[5] One can imagine adding 30% Solein to bread could reasonably add up to 8 g of protein per slice. This implies a potential market for Solein of 2.06 million tonnes annually, or 41 times the size of Solar Foods’ current 5-year billion-Euro plan, not to mention other geographical and product markets.
Why not make British Columbia, Canada a major host of microbial agriculture businesses, due to BC obtaining virtually all of its electricity from renewable sources? BC could start by helping to ethically satisfy North Americans’ hunger for protein.
Current Efforts
Around 25 companies are engaged in efforts to turn carbon dioxide into protein, with only some of them aimed for human consumption.[6] Two of the prominent companies aiming at humans are Solar Foods of Finland and Air Protein of California, USA.
Solar Foods states that it is able to pull carbon dioxide and water from the air through Direct Air Capture technology.[7] Its first factory, with a production capacity of 160 tonnes of Solein per year,[8] came online in 2024. Solein is about 78% protein. The factory currently uses Direct Air Capture for only about 15% of its carbon dioxide, with the rest sourced commercially.[9] The second factory, with a production capacity of 12,800 tonnes of Solein, around 80 times the first factory,[10] is in a pre-engineering phase and is planned to be operational 2028. 12,800 tonnes of Solein is enough to provide 40 g of protein on a daily basis to about 684,000 people.[11] An additional two factories in the same complex are planned to be added on a five-year timeline, amounting to 50,000 tonnes of Solein produced per year.
Air Protein is part of Kiverdi, Inc, a company with various patents for extracting protein and oils from microbes. Air Protein has one factory in San Leandro, California and expected a commercial output of 150 kL.[12] Air Protein recently signed a strategic partnership with ADM which provided the mutually exclusive rights for ADM and Air Protein to collaborate to build and operate the world’s first Air Protein commercial scale plant.[13]
What to do
These technologies are commercialising, but the scale is much too small. The private sector has not yet taken on responsibility for sufficient scale. For larger scale progress, people need to come together to plan for sufficient electricity, government support and market penetration. A community of people could work together to address issues that a smaller group of otherwise busy project developers may not have thought of, like for example sufficiently educating a workforce in this area. A non-profit organization can help to focus this community perspective in addition to industry and government.
If you think people should join together to address the needed scale up of these technologies, please go to “Memberships”.
[1] See Kiverdi – an Unreasonable company. Also, regarding the company Solar Foods, 50,000 tonnes of Solein at 78% protein amounts to 39,000 tonnes of protein per proposed factory complex. Soy beans produce an average of 3.16 metric tonnes per hectare per year. At 42% protein, this amounts to 1.33 tonnes of protein per hectare per year.
[2] Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture – Our World in Data
[3] National Climate Assessment: Great Plains’ Ogallala Aquifer drying out | NOAA Climate.gov
[4] The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source | Scientific American
[5] Bread and bakery products in the United States – statistics & facts | Statista
[6] These companies are creating food out of thin air | MIT Technology Review
[7] An elemental perspective to food production – Solar Foods produces a novel ingredient out of electricity and air – Solar Foods
[9] These companies are creating food out of thin air | MIT Technology Review
[10] With New Factory in Sight, Solar Foods Signs Latest Deal to Bring Solein Protein to Market
[11] (12800000*.78/.04)/365
[12] what is the capacity of air protein’s san leandro factory – Search
[13] ADM, Air Protein Sign Strategic Agreement to Advance Development and Production of Unique Landless Protein
PSUMA 