Chinese scientists have developed a cost-effective way to convert coal into protein, which they say feeds livestock far more efficiently than natural plants while using very little land. Pastures used to raise livestock and farmland used to produce animal feed combine to occupy 40 million square kilometers (15.4 million square miles), according to OurWorld in Data. That's well over a quarter of the Earth's entire dry land area, and nearly 40 percent of the land defined as "habitable."
This is one of the reasons why Westerners' meat-heavy diet has come under fire for being environmentally unsustainable; growing plants to feed animals makes an extremely inefficient use of land that could be set aside for forests or used for other purposes.
Currently, more than a quarter of the planet's dry land is used to grow plants for feed and grazing for livestock. One solution is to grow meat in the lab -- but another might be to start using other methods to produce protein for livestock feed. This is particularly beneficial to China. According to biotechnology researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China currently needs to import about 80% of its protein raw materials in the form of soybeans, which is a serious food safety issue for the country.
Therefore, the team set out to develop a process for producing protein from fossil fuels, building on the oil-to-protein biotechnology pioneered by BP back in the 1960s.
The process flow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences team is as follows: First, coal is converted into methanol through gasification - a technology that can now achieve almost zero carbon emissions. The methanol is then fed to a special strain of Pichia pastoris, which ferments the methanol, producing a single-cell protein containing various amino acids, vitamins, inorganic salts, fats and carbohydrates. The resulting organism is much richer in protein than plants and can be used to partially replace animal feed such as fish, soy, meat and skim milk.
The team's key innovation was to select and genetically engineer a yeast strain to be more tolerant of the toxic effects of methanol than previous strains, thus maximizing transformation efficiency and reducing the amount of carbon lost in the process.
The result: The yeast can convert methanol into protein at a conversion rate of 92% of the process's maximum theoretical yield. This makes it "a cost-effective option for industrial production of proteins," the team said.
According to the South China Morning Post, the researchers have connected with an undisclosed production partner to begin an industrial-scale demonstration, with "thousands of tonnes of the protein already being produced in a single factory."
The research results were published in the journal "Biotechnology for Biofuels".