Synthetic fat from petroleum as a resilient food for global catastrophes: Preliminary techno-economic assessment and technology roadmap

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

“…However, more research is needed prior to using fat derived from petroleum wax as a safe food for GCRs: feasibility needs to be demonstrated with a proof of concept, and nutritional studies should also be conducted to assess the safety and potential as a food. A very similar food was produced and consumed in Germany during the 19th century [ 113 ].…”

“…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 ].…”

“…Previous research has suggested the conversion of hydrocarbon-derived waxes to produce digestible fats—similar to margarine or cooking oils—independently of sunlight and conventional agriculture [ 113 ]. Given the low number of fat-rich foods that are potentially resilient to abrupt sunlight reduction, it might prove difficult to provide enough fat to the global population in these scenarios.…”

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).…”