Hey, kids — it's trivia time. But don't sweat today's question because it's an easy one.
What do you get when you take carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere, hydrogen from water split by renewable energy, and glycerol, then use proprietary catalysts in high-pressure bubble reactors to synthesize hydrocarbon chains, oxidize them into fatty acids, esterify them into triglycerides that mimic the molecular structure of a common fat, and finally blend and crystallize the result, before extruding it into four-ounce sticks?
Something very much but not exactly like butter!
See, I told you this was an easy one.
But don't all rush to the store at once. Backed by investments from Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Savor's Frankenbutter (not its actual name) won't reach grocery store shelves until 2027. That's assuming that construction, permitting, and commissioning dates don't slip due to supply chain disruptions for the necessary specialized reactors and catalysts.
Mmm... creamy specialized reactors and catalysts.
Or, as I not-so-gently put it on X, you could just eat some freakin' butter from a cow.
(I did not use "freakin'" on X, where I go to vent my considerable spleen.)
Seriously, if Savor's "butter" processing facility looked any more like an oil refinery, Ukraine would bomb it. They don't even have a consumer-friendly name for Frankenbutter yet. So far, the company refers to their catalytically converted, bubble-column-reactor-induced butter-type product as “butter made from carbon” or “animal- and plant-free butter.”
On the plus side, independent blind tests gave Frankenbutter a nine out of 10 for authenticity. "Most important," Gates himself said, "it tastes really good – like the real thing, because chemically it is." Then again, Gates also said of mushroom-based steak-u-lux products, "You can get used to the taste."
"No, Bill," I keep shouting into the void, "you can."
With all that fracking or whatever is going on, I'd hope for something indistinguishable from the real thing. But the chemistry involved is all way above my pay grade, which is why I got my "trivia question" after setting both GPT and Grok loose on the problem with this prompt: "Tell me in excruciating and well-documented detail exactly how Bill Gates' lab-made butter is manufactured."
The last time I had either one of them take so long to produce an answer was because I'd asked for an essay-length dive into the production of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. No joke.
Don't let it be said that I stand in the way of progress. I've been a tech nerd since I bought my first computer — a gently used Commodore VIC-20 — for $100 in lawn-mowing money more than 40 years ago. I bought an iPod (still have it, actually) so long ago that it has a spinning hard drive in it. I think the Cybertruck is pretty cool, ackshully, mostly because somebody bothered to rethink the pickup truck for the first time in decades.
I like new stuff. I love progress. But you're going to have a difficult time convincing me that it's progress to go through that much trouble manufacturing a product very much but not exactly like butter.
What we have here is a fortune chasing a dream few people share — with plans to force it on the rest of us.
So let me finish with a thought I shared on X last night, after I first learned about Frankenbutter.
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