Experiments revealed that a diverse range of food-producing organisms, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produces mushrooms, can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output. This technology is approximately four times more energy efficient than growing algae photosynthetically.
According to a study conducted by the University of California, scientists have discovered a way to create food that is not dependent on sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis. A two-step electrocatalytic process converts carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate.
In order to grow, food-producing organisms consume acetate in the dark. The hybrid organic-inorganic system has the potential to increase the efficiency of sunlight conversion into food by up to 18 times for some foods.
For millions of years, plants have evolved photosynthesis to convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight energy into plant biomass and the foods we eat. However, this process is inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight reaching the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have discovered a way to create food without the need for biological photosynthesis by using artificial photosynthesis.
The study, which was published in the journal Nature Food, employs a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the main component of vinegar. In order to grow, food-producing organisms consume acetate in the dark. This hybrid organic-inorganic system, when combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food by up to 18 times for some foods.
“We sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis,” said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UC Riverside.
The output of the electrolyzer was optimized to support the growth of food-producing organisms in order to integrate all of the system’s components. Electrolyzers are electrical devices that convert raw materials such as carbon dioxide into useful molecules and products. The amount of acetate produced was increased while the amount of salt used was decreased, resulting in the most acetate ever produced in an electrolyzer to date.
“We were able to achieve a high selectivity towards acetate that cannot be accessed through conventional CO2 electrolysis routes using a state-of-the-art two-step tandem CO2 electrolysis setup developed in our laboratory,” said corresponding author Feng Jiao of the University of Delaware.
Experiments revealed that a diverse range of food-producing organisms, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produces mushrooms, can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output. This technology is approximately four times more energy efficient than growing algae photosynthetically. Yeast production is approximately 18- fold more energy-efficient than traditional methods of cultivation that use corn sugar.
“We were able to grow food-producing organisms in the absence of biological photosynthesis. These organisms are typically grown on sugars derived from plants or inputs derived from petroleum – a product of biological photosynthesis that occurred millions of years ago. This technology is a more efficient way of converting solar energy into food than biological photosynthesis,” said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study.
In 2020, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) committed to reducing net emissions across its value chain by 30% by 2030, before bringing them to net-zero by 2040. At the time, CCEP said in a statement that it is ready to go further and faster after reducing value chain emissions by 30.5% since 2010.
Going further and faster has seen its Ventures arm (CCEP Ventures) collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to explore novel methods of capturing carbon and then using it as a feedstock.
Speaking exclusively with edie, Craig Twyford, Head of CCEP Ventures, stated that this project (which will originally last three years) would enable the firm to support scientists and experts to hopefully deliver a viable, onsite method to capture carbon emissions from facilities and then use them in products in a bid to drive down emissions.
“I think this is incredibly exciting,” Twyford told edie. “It’s a big picture idea, but if we start thinking of carbon as not just a problem but also as a feedstock, then there’s a lot of things we can start to change.
“The way I envisage it, but obviously there’s many twists and turns along the way, is that we’d ideally be able to fit direct air capture units to each of our sites that draws down the carbon in a cost-effective and efficient way. The biggest impact will probably be if we can use this to carbonate our drinks and produce sugar, but it could have impact elsewhere.”
Sugar focus
CCEP is financing the three-year research programme that will be led by the Peidong Yang Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, which will first and foremost focus on the production of sugar from onsite carbon at an industrial scale. CCEP and Twyford believe that lab-scale prototypes could be the first step in making raw materials and packaging more sustainable and with a lower carbon footprint in the long run.
Sugarcane is not only the source of most of the world’s sugar, but is also the most produced food crop in the world. Sugarcane production has increased by more than 10% in the last 10 years with the crop now being utilised outside of the food space, namely in the creation of biofuels and controversial bioplastics.
Research from food analytics company Spoonshots found that the average water footprint used to produce 1kg of refined sugar is the equivalent of two years of drinking water for one person. Additionally, firms like British Sugar have calculated that 0.6g of CO2 equivalent is produced for every gram of sugar made.
As the population continues to grow, land becomes more contested and forests burned down for agricultural processes, it is clear that innovating the agri-sector is key to combatting key megatrends like land loss and degradation, deforestation and the climate crisis.
For companies like CCEP, agricultural ingredients, including sugar, can account for around 25% of the firm’s overall carbon footprint. Tackling emissions associated with agri-ingredients will be key to reaching net-zero.
Twyford points out that this innovation could also assist in reducing “some of the largest carbon contributors” across the value chain, namely by saving on raw and finite materials for things like packaging – by turning carbon into PET plastic and reducing the need for crude oil – and fuel and reducing transportation and logistics costs due to the onsite aspect of the project.
Supply chain innovation
Given that the majority of CCEP’s Scope 3 emissions are in the supply chain, the company is aiming to help all of its strategic suppliers set science-based targets and transition to 100% renewable electricity. For ingredient and packaging-related emissions, the company will accelerate plans relating to sustainable agriculture and 100% recycled plastics. Some life-cycle analyses have found that soft drinks bottles made using 100% post-consumer-recycled plastic generate 40% less CO2e than virgin plastic bottles.
Twyford stated that this innovation would likely have the biggest impact on its Scope 3 aspirations, but that there were still plenty of challenges to overcome.
“There are some hurdles but it think [the research team] can overcome them,” Twyford said. “The challenges are around selectivity and efficiency and creating the right glucose. So the first three years will be seeing how these challenges can be overcome. But [the team] has a roadmap for this and 2025 will come around quickly, at which point we’ll start asking ‘where do we go from here’?”
While the success of the initial research hinges on overcoming barriers, the long-term ambition for this project is scalability. Twyford believes that having an organisation as large as CCEP, which serves 1.75 million customers across 29 countries, will create some confidence in the carbon capture market which, to date, has looked at larger projects between a cluster of organisations and sites.
Crucially, CCEP believes that this vision could be shared across the industry, helping other firms to decarbonise at a pace on the road to net-zero.
“Everyone needs to learn off everyone,” Twyford said. “So if these direct air capture systems can really be used to help us view carbon as a valuable feedstock then this can be a solution that will help a lot of industries. I think these types of solutions will be industry-wide eventually.
“For us, we think that if we can take on a leadership role to back this, then others may look at us and view this as something that is serious and can be scaled.”
CCEP is not the only firm with this view. Carpet manufacturer, Interface, for example i forging ahead with its Climate Take Back strategy, which is also filled to the brim with moonshot goals. It focuses on “bringing carbon home and reversing climate change” and to “stop seeing carbon as the enemy, and start using it as a resource”. Indeed, many industrial firms have switched their mindset to stop “demonising” carbon and instead realise the potential that is could have as a key material building block.
Twyford ends by reiterating that this will not see the company become sugar manufacturers and that any success will require the expertise of its existing supply chain to help share advice and best practice.
To this end, earlier in the week, CCEP confirmed the creation of a sustainability-linked supply chain finance programme that will be operated by specialist food and agri-bank Rabobank.
The new finance programme will reward suppliers that make improvements on sustainability across the business and will feature sustainability-linked KPIs that, if met, will create discounts against the initial funding rate.
Petra Nova, once billed as the largest U.S. project to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant, opened to considerable publicity in Texas in late 2016.
Less than four years later, owner NRG Energy Inc. NRG -0.20% shut down the carbon-capture system, which cost $1 billion—not because the technology wasn’t working but because the expected end use for the carbon was no longer economically viable. The coal plant continues to generate electricity and emit carbon.
Carbon-capture projects are attracting renewed attention from investors and governments world-wide as concerns mount about the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change. But the initiatives have a dismal record.
More than 80% of proposed commercial carbon-capture efforts around the world have failed, primarily because the technology didn’t work as expected or the projects proved too expensive to operate, according to a 2020 study by researchers at Canada’s Carleton University, the University of California, San Diego and other institutions.
The U.S. has spent $1.1 billion on carbon-capture demonstration projects since 2009, with uneven results, according to a December report from the Government Accountability Office. None of the eight coal projects selected for $684 million of the funding during that time is operating, the researchers found. Projects to capture carbon from heavy industries met with some success.
While some early projects have demonstrated that it is technologically possible to collect carbon from power plants and industrial sites—or even directly out of the air—they have generally been very expensive. Many face a fundamental problem: there is no economic use for the carbon they capture.
Currently, the only large-scale use for captured carbon is for pushing more oil and gas out of declining reservoirs, which in turn leads to additional emissions when the fossil fuels are burned for energy. In the U.S., there is no federal requirement that companies capture carbon emissions, or carbon taxes or other fees aimed at discouraging them from releasing the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
As a result, most carbon-capture initiatives don’t save companies money or generate profits, and they represent an added business expense. Still, some companies are pursuing the projects to reduce their carbon footprint under pressure from investors and activists concerned about climate change.
A fresh round of U.S. carbon-capture projects is in the works, bolstered by around $12.1 billion in funding in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed into law last year by President Biden. Oil, power, chemicals and biofuels companies are kicking off a wave of new proposed carbon-capture investments, including carbon-transport pipelines in Iowa, a coal-power plant in North Dakota and a hydrogen plant in Louisiana.
Large fossil-fuel companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM -2.59% and Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY -4.02% are touting carbon capture as a part of their future plans to reduce emissions—and lobbying Congress to increase a tax credit to make the projects more economically sustainable.
New carbon-capture projects are bolstered by the infrastructure bill President Biden signed into law last year. PHOTO: SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Many companies and climate activists say governments need to nurture innovative technologies to capture emissions that would otherwise be hard to cut. Accelerating such projects, they argue, is the only realistic way to reach the targets of the international Paris agreement, which seeks to keep rising temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“To meet the goals of the Paris climate accords, there’s no way we can do it without direct-air capture,” Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub said in an interview. The company, which uses carbon to extract oil, plans to build facilities to capture it straight from the air, but considers the potential tax-credit expansion vital to its efforts.
Exxon is proposing a project with other companies in Houston to capture and bury the carbon from an array of industries. But it would be difficult to launch at its proposed size without policy changes such as a larger tax credit, said Erik Oswald, a vice president at Exxon.
Congress is considering boosting the credit for collecting carbon emissions from smokestacks by 70% to $85 for a metric ton if the carbon is stashed in saline geologic formations, or $60 if it is sent down oil wells. Direct air projects would get $180 for a metric ton if the carbon is stored, or $130 for oil.
Less generous tax credits have been on the books since 2008 but have failed to create a real carbon-capture industry. “There’s been little material impact on the deployment of carbon capture and storage,” said Scott Anderson, senior director of energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based advocacy group.
The infrastructure bill included funding for pipelines and storage to help build a missing puzzle piece: a spider’s web of infrastructure that could gather and ship carbon from multiple sites.
“That’s a massive step forward for carbon capture and carbon storage,” said Cindy Crane, chief executive of Enchant Energy Corp., which plans to retrofit a coal-fired power plant in New Mexico with carbon-capture equipment for around $1.3 billion. The project would also require up to roughly $390 million in plant improvements, a pipeline and storage field.
Globally, industries will have to raise carbon-capture capacity by a factor of 50 to 100 times over what is in the development pipeline to achieve what the International Energy Agency estimates is needed to reach “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2070, said John Bradford, professor of geophysics and vice president for global initiatives at the Colorado School of Mines.
Building those projects—and keeping them running—can be costly. Petra Nova was a joint venture of NRG and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. that captured some emissions from a coal plant near Houston and piped them about 80 miles to an oil field, where they were used to push more crude out of the ground. The government awarded the project around $195 million in a proof-of-concept grant.
Petra Nova closed in 2020 after the pandemic reduced demand for fuel and led to a collapse in oil prices, which made the oil that the captured carbon was helping produce less economically viable. It remains in mothball status, though NRG said it proved the technology could work on a coal-fired plant.
“We continue to explore options to improve the economics,” said NRG spokesman Chris Rimel.
Mississippi Power’s plant in De Kalb, Miss. The company is the utility arm behind the Kemper project. PHOTO: ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In Mississippi, a carbon-capture initiative by utility Southern Co. SO 0.35% has turned into a white elephant. The project known as Kemper aimed to use locally mined lignite coal to fuel a power plant, and capture the resulting carbon emissions, which were then to be sent to oil fields to prime crude production. The Energy Department invested $387 million.
Forecast to cost $3 billion in 2010, Kemper’s costs spiraled above $7 billion. Once constructed, the coal-gasification technology never quite worked as intended, and Southern abandoned its initial plans, burning natural gas in the power plant instead.
The company imploded coal and carbon-capture equipment that couldn’t be dismantled for resale last October. Coal conveyors from Kemper are now available for sale online.
“It was the end of a long, bad experiment,” said Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, a Kemper critic. Mr. Presley said he favors innovation but believes government and business should bear the risk instead of utility ratepayers.
Mr. Presley and other regulators didn’t allow Southern to pass Kemper’s full cost on to customers. The company, which had to assume some $6 billion on the project’s cost, is paying for demolition of the carbon-capture part, estimated at $10 million to $20 million annually through 2025, said a spokesman for Mississippi Power, the utility arm behind the project.
The federal government is now funding a $24 million feasibility study that includes the same plant—this time for capturing and storing carbon emissions from natural gas.
California will soon enact the largest mandatory residential food waste recycling program in the US in January, an effort designed to dramatically cut down on organic waste in landfills and reduce the state’s methane emissions.
When food scraps such as banana peels and leftover veggies and other organic materials break down they emit methane, a greenhouse gas more potent and damaging in the short-term than carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Organic material such as food and yard waste makes up a fifth of the state’s methane emissions and half of everything in California landfills, according to CalRecycle.
California plans to start converting food waste into compost or energy in order to avoid these emissions, becoming the second state to do so after Vermont launched a similar program last year.
“This is the biggest change to trash since recycling started in the 1980s,” said Rachel Wagoner, the director of the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery.
Most California residents will be required to toss excess food into green waste bins rather than the trash. Municipalities will then turn the food waste into compost or use it to create biogas, an energy source that is similar to natural gas.
A truck unloads organic waste to be used for composting at a facility in Woodland, California. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Recycling food waste “is the single easiest and fastest thing that every single person can do to affect climate change”, Wagoner said.
The effort reflects growing recognition about the role food waste plays in damaging the environment. Up to 40% of food in the US is wasted, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
A handful of states and countries, including France, have passed laws requiring grocery stores and other large businesses to recycle or donate excess food to charities, but California’s program targets households and businesses. In 2016, California passed a law aimed at reducing methane emissions by significantly cutting down on discarded food.
Starting in January, all cities and counties that provide trash services are supposed to have food recycling programs in place and grocery stores must donate edible food that otherwise would be thrown away to food banks or similar organizations.
“There’s just no reason to stick this material in a landfill, it just happens to be cheap and easy to do so,” said Ned Spang, faculty lead for the Food Loss and Waste Collaborative at the University of California, Davis.
Vermont, home to 625,000 people compared with California’s nearly 40 million, is the only other state that bans residents from throwing their food waste in the trash. Under a law that took effect in July 2020, residents can compost the waste in their yards, opt for curbside pick up or drop it at waste stations. Seattle and San Francisco have similar programs.
Students discard their uneaten lunch into a food waste can at an elementary school in Connecticut. Photograph: Dave Zajac/AP
Under California’s new law, the state must cut organic waste in landfills by 75% from 2014 levels by 2025, or from about 23m tons to 5.7m tons.
Most local governments will allow homeowners and apartment dwellers to dump excess food into yard waste bins, with some providing countertop containers to hold the scraps for a few days before taking it outside. Some areas can get exemptions for parts of the law, such as rural locations where bears rummage through trash cans.
The food waste will go to facilities for composting or for turning it into energy through anaerobic digestion, a process that creates biogas that can be used like natural gas for heating and electricity.
But only a fifth of California’s composting facilities may accept food waste, and they face a strict permitting process to take food waste alongside traditional green waste such as leaves.
The state also set a 2025 goal of diverting 20% of food that would otherwise go to landfills to feed people in need. Supermarkets must start donating their excess food in January and hotels, restaurants, hospitals, schools and large event venues will start doing so in 2024. The donation part of the law will contribute toward a federal goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030.
Davis, California, already has a mandatory food recycling program. Joy Klineberg puts coffee grounds, fruit rinds and cooking scraps into a metal bin labeled “compost” on her countertop. When preparing dinners, she empties excess food from the cutting board into the bin.
Every few days, she dumps the contents into her green waste bin outside, which is picked up and sent to a county facility. Unpleasant countertop bin smells haven’t been a problem, she said.
Joy Klineberg lives in Davis, California, where residents are already required to recycle their food waste. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
“All you’re changing is where you’re throwing things, it’s just another bin,” she said. “It’s really easy, and it’s amazing how much less trash you have.”
Implementing similar programs in bigger cities is more challenging.
Los Angeles and San Diego, the state’s two most populous cities, which together account for about one of every eight Californians, are among those that won’t have their programs ready for all households next month.
That’s because it takes time to buy the necessary equipment, such as green waste bins for households that don’t already have them for yard waste and to set up facilities to take the material. Trash collection fees will go up in many places.
CalRecycle also wants to focus more on education and less on punishment. Governments can avoid penalties by self-reporting to the state by March if they don’t have programs in place and outlining plans for starting them. Cities that refuse to comply could eventually be fined up to $10,000 a day.
Ken Prue, the deputy director of San Diego’s environmental services department, said the city put nearly $9m in this year’s budget to buy more waste bins, countertop containers and trucks to haul the additional waste.
Prue hopes San Diego residents will quickly realize the importance of recycling food waste after the program starts next summer.
“Hopefully before they know it, it becomes second nature,” he said.
