Potential of microbial electrosynthesis for contributing to food production using CO2 during global agriculture-inhibiting disasters

Nutrition in Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios: Envisioning Feasible Balanced Diets on Resilient Foods

“…For simplicity, the energy needs to be covered are based on the minimum recommended requirements of an average adult as proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) for food management during emergencies [ 23 ]: 2100 kcal of energy intake, for a body weight of 62 kg [ 24 ], as carried out in previous food-related GCR assessments [ 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 ].…”

“…However, the energy efficiency values (electricity to calories) of cultivating these species in closed environments are expected to be much lower than for the abovementioned hydrogen-based single cell protein (4% vs. 18%) [ 118 ], which also contain fats and essential fatty acids [ 119 ]. Microbial electrosynthesis could be used for the production of acetic acid, and potentially longer-chain, more nutritionally-rich fatty acids as the technology develops [ 27 ]. Similarly, food ingredients such as sugars and glycerol (glycerin) could be produced with non-biological processes from agriculture-independent sources, such as CO 2 [ 120 ] or hydrocarbons [ 113 ].…”

Deployment of Resilient Foods Can Greatly Reduce Famine in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario

“…Relocation contributed to meeting macronutritional needs most when scaled in combination with other foods. While many challenges remain before they are ready for rapid deployment at scale, solutions such as industrial foods and seaweeds could possibly scale to 2x or more of current global human minimum caloric requirements within the first few years after a 150 Tg scenario onset, given sufficiently large portions of global industrial and economic resources [15][16][17][18][19] .…”

Rapid repurposing of pulp and paper mills, biorefineries, and breweries for lignocellulosic sugar production in global food catastrophes

“…Of these methods, 24/7 construction produced the greatest acceleration with reasonable penalty, and was therefore selected as the construction method to be used during the scaling calculations. The methodology for fast construction time and cost estimation developed here has been useful in several other works (García Martínez et al, 2020, 2021c, 2021d, 2021b.…”

“…The simpler analysis performed in this previous work estimated that cellulosic sugar could scale to reach 100% of global human caloric requirements after a year (Denkenberger and Pearce, 2014), which has turned out to be optimistic. More detailed analysis has been conducted investigating other industrial solutions such as single cell protein from natural gas (García Martínez et al, 2020) or from CO 2 and hydrogen (García Martínez et al, 2021d), synthetic fat (García Martínez et al, 2021b), and acetic acid from CO 2 via microbial electrosynthesis (García Martínez et al, 2021c). CO 2 could also be used to chemically synthesize carbohydrates (García Martínez et al, 2021a).…”