Peter Rowe is part of the REACT-FIRST consortium and CEO of Deep Branch, a British carbon recycling biotechnology company. They have pioneered a process that uses microbes to convert carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and turns them into high-value proteins. This way, they aim to secure the global food system by meeting the demand for food and feed sustainably without compromising nutrition or quality.
Where did the idea of fixing carbon dioxide into foods come from?
Peter Rowe: The idea of using carbon dioxide to make food is not anything new. Plants do it. Plants use carbon dioxide as a source of carbon to grow and produce food. What’s more interesting is that plants evolved from the same kind of microbes that we use in our process. Recently, we have developed means to use these microbes to produce biofuels or nutrients such as proteins, through fermentation.
The project aims to revolutionise food production, why do we need to rethink this issue?
Peter Rowe: Feeding the world population is putting increasingly more pressure on arable land, not only because we will be needing more food, but richer populations also have a higher demand for (animal) protein. However, arable land cannot alone meet these increasing demands, thus, having an alternative production method to feed those animals can ease the pressure on the land, helping us combat climate change.
In lay terms, what does the process look like?
Peter Rowe: The best analogy would be making wine. This is a relatively well-known fermentation-based process. For making wine, you use grape juice, which is sugar rich, as feedstock. Sugar, which is made of carbon, is the energy that you feed the fermenting microorganisms that will produce the wine (ethanol) in a bioreactor, which is nothing more than a large stainless-steel vessel.
Although the process is very similar to ours, there are a couple differences. First, instead of using sugar, we use carbon dioxide as a carbon source as well as hydrogen and oxygen. Second, instead of wine, our microorganisms produce protein. The more they grow, the more protein they accumulate and when the rate at which the microbes are growing is the same as the input’s rate, production can be continuous.
The output is transformed into a powder similar to powdered milk that is 100 percent microbial biomass. Of that microbial biomass, approximately 70 percent is protein, which can be used as an ingredient for animal feed.
What are the main environmental/ecological advantages of such a production method?
Peter Rowe: I think the first one would be that you can do it anywhere where there is carbon dioxide and energy, which is most places. The second, linked to the first one, means less global transport lower the carbon footprint of product shipping.
Using renewable energy for the process can result in at least 70 percent savings compared to soy protein, or according to our data, at least a 25 percent saving in the carbon footprint of a salmon steak.
Finally, in contrast to arable land, this technology does not depend on environmental conditions like, uh, sunlight and warm weather, which makes it very reliable.
Your process results in a protein product used later as a component of animal feed. Still, animals are important contributors to global warming, why not directly produce protein for human consumption?
Peter Rowe: We want to be able to sort of address a diverse number of markets and different applications within those markets. So, in the future, we would be interested in using it for food production.
However, to reach that point, there is much work to be done in terms of sensory optimisation, texture, flavor, mouth feel. Luckily, our single cell protein is relatively neutral in terms of texture, flavor, and mouthfeel.
Nonetheless, we feel that consumers still lack awareness on how the process works, the safety of the product… and that is why we focused on the feed market, where the nutritional profile is the main factor to be considered. On the other hand, aside from better informing consumer choices to be more environmentally conscious, the reality is that animal protein consumption is increasing.
Thus, our pragmatic approach is that of reducing the environmental impact of such increased consumption through carbon dioxide fixation in animal feed.
New technologies help reduce the environmental impact of our eating habits, would it not be better to change how we eat?
Peter Rowe: As I mentioned before, looking at the data, it does not seem like customers are massively shifting towards removing animal protein from their diets, more like the opposite. Even if customers are aware of the environmental impact of their food choices, being consequent is not always easy, and there are many socioeconomic as well as cultural factors at play that cannot be ignored.
That is why I am not sure that we will ever be – completely– removing animals from our diets, for that reason I think that, at a minimum, we need to make sure we are doing it as ethically and sustainably as possible.