Co-written by Bethan Owen, Department of Bioengineering
Our current methods of food production use significant amounts of water, land, and other resources, all while generating CO2 emissions and other waste. But food production is so essential that there’s not much we can do about these inherent costs. Or is there?
What if we could dramatically reduce the number of resources we need to make food? What if we could produce food with nothing more than air, electricity, and water? It might sound futuristic, but researchers including professor Mohan Sankaran and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the U.S. government agency that gave them a $10.4 million grant for this very project—believe that this reality might be closer than it seems.
“The goal of this project is rather simple: make food from air and water using electricity,” Sankaran said. “The idea is that if we can make food this way, then it would be sustainable (i.e., less of a carbon footprint) and enable it to be made remotely, on demand (using readily available sources from our surroundings).”
“We are trying to develop a new method of food production that allows us to produce food in a sustainable, profitable and scalable way that could address both food safety and climate change,” said bioengineering professor Ting Lu, one of the other PIs of the project. “The world population is increasing. It is anticipated that by 2050, there will be about 10 billion people around the world, but our arable land continues to decline. So there’s a need to create a novel way of food production that can allow us to overcome the limitations of our current production practices.”
Not only is this food production goal much more cost efficient and better for the environment than our current methods, but it’s highly portable.
“We can produce food in the Caribbean and at the North Pole, in theory,” Lu said. “There are all kinds of applications; you could create food on an island, or on a ship, or on a battlefield.”
While the idea is impressive, Sankaran says the method is much more complex. “It requires several steps that are each in their own right complex, and then all the steps must be integrated to work together,” he said. “Some of those steps are to ‘fix’ the N2 and CO2 in air to compounds such as ammonia and acetate, and then feed these compounds to microbes to produce biomass containing the proteins and carbohydrates that make up food, and then bioprocessing steps to turn the biomass into more palatable forms of food including texture and taste.”
“In my lab, we have been studying a plasma process to fix nitrogen from air to ammonia. The plasma is operated at atmospheric pressure using electricity. Thus, it can provide a solution to one of the critical steps, the synthesis of ammonia as a substrate for microbes. Another Co-PI, Prof. Paul Kenis, will be making another substrate for the microbes, acetate, by a different electrified chemical process (no plasmas). Both processes have been demonstrated at smaller scales but will need to be scaled up. He and I will be working together because the processes bear similarities and the scale up challenges are similar.”
Currently, this vision is for the produced food to be more of a supplement than a full meal, with plans to structure this new source of nutrients into three different forms: a shake, a gel, and a dried jerky. Lu has a goal of producing 100 grams of food by the end of next year, and a broader goal of one day seeing production plants that can create this food on a larger scale.
Sankaran is joined in this venture by his co-PIs, including Lu (bioengineering), Kenis (chemical and biomolecular engineering), Christopher V. Rao (chemical and biomolecular engineering), Yong-Su Jin (food science and human nutrition), Keith Cadwallader (food science and human nutrition), and Vijay Singh (agricultural and biological engineering).
“While my role is a smaller part of the whole project, the entire problem depends on each part, which is what makes the project from a scientific perspective so exciting” Sankaran said. “It is truly an example of an interdisciplinary project where experts have to come together, learn from each other, and find a way to solve problems at the interface of different disciplines. Amazingly, all the experts needed are all at Illinois, which makes it even more unique.”