About a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions are created during food production. Foodtech startup Arkeon has proposed reversing the process by using gas fermentation to convert CO2 into food. It has a secret ingredient: a tiny microbe found in an underwater volcano.
“If you want to find these microbes, you don’t have to start germany number data on your table or in your garden. You have to look where there are microbes with properties that we don’t yet know about, like at the bottom of a volcano,” explains Gregor Tagl, co-founder and CEO of Arkeon.
This little microbe can do a lot. Food production accounts for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. For example, a beef burger is 2 kg of CO2 emissions.
to turn everything upside down and instead of producing emissions, cook food from them.
Feeding microbes with gas
Gas fermentation, a process similar to precision fermentation, is a trend that investors have recently taken notice of. They invested $133 million in the technology in 2021 and $90 million in 2022, mostly in seed-stage startups.
Precision fermentation uses DNA splicing to insert animal genes into yeast microbes. This is followed by a process similar to brewing beer, resulting in a milk-like liquid. The yeast microbes feed on carbohydrates and sugars.
As Tagle explains, Arkeon's gas fermentation is not too different from this: "It's very similar, but instead of using sugar-based nutrients that need to be grown on agricultural land, we use carbon dioxide and hydrogen as raw materials."