In China, more than 1 in 2 cars sold is an EV

EV and PHEV sales in China continue to motor ahead.

The first chart shows EV and PHEV sales in absolute terms, seasonally adjusted (by me), and plotted on a log scale.   A log scale shows a time series with a constant growth rate as a straight line.  The line on the chart below has been gradually levelling off, implying that the growth rate trend is gradually slowing.

This is confirmed by the chart below.  There are wild swings over the covid period, but the trend growth rate has slipped to 30% per annum over the last 3 years.  That's still a high growth rate, which would lead to a doubling of EV sales every 3 years.

The growth rate of EVs remains much higher than the growth rate of petrol cars.  In fact, petrol car sales in China peaked in 2018/19, recovered partially after the Covid lockdowns, but have since resumed their decline.  The chart below shows EVs/PHEVs as a percentage of total car registrations.  It is not plotted on a log scale.  Note the occasional spikes, which occur when EV sales go up and total sales go down.  This happens when government incentive schemes change, or when Chinese New Year moves, or simply because of random swings in the time series--one zigging up and the other down in the same month.  (Seasonal adjustment of monthly time series in China is tricky because of the peripatetic new year.)  There is no fundamental reason for the spike in April, or for the decline in May and June, and I expect to see it reversed over the next few months.  EVs will continue to gain market share, because battery prices continue to decline fast, and even despite government attempts to reduce very competitive conditions, EV prices are likely to remain under pressure.

China produces ~1/3rd of the world's cars, and EVs/PHEVs make up more than half of them.  By the end of this year, that ratio will prolly be 60%.   It's worth remembering that in January 2014, only 0.2% of cars sold in China were EVs or PHEVs.  And notice the surge in the percentage of EV sales over the last five years, from 5% to 55%.  (Just a personal note:  most analysts got this acceleration completely wrong.  Prof Ray Wills and Tony Seba got it right.  And luckily, I believed them, so I did too.)  This is a classic S-curve, but it shows no signs of flexing over, yet, though as EV sales head towards 80 or 90% of total sales, that has to be imminent.

[Data sources:  José Pontes at CleanTechnica; Prof Ray Wills, China's NBS (National Bureau of Statistics); my seasonal adjustment (tweaked X-11 variant); my smoothing, using a 13-term Henderson curve.]

You're eating precision fermentation foods already

From green queen

Precision fermentation has been around for decades, and most of us eat foods that contain ingredients made using the technology on a daily basis. Animal-free dairy makers are now using it to bring you the cheese and milk you love without the environmental cost.

As the alternative protein industry matures, it is increasingly under attack from food industry lobbies and interest groups. Of late, precision fermentation technology, used to create animal-free dairy foods, has been the target of the Non-GMO Project, a U.S. based non profit organization focused on alerting consumers to the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food products. In a press release published during National Dairy Month in the U.S., the organization described animal-free dairy made from precision fermentation as unregulated and dangerous. We thought it would be prudent to address the allegations as a matter of separating fact from fiction.

Let’s start with the most important facts: precision fermentation (PF) is a technology that has been around for 30 years, is entirely safe and is used in dozens (if not hundreds) of products you interact with every day. That cousin of yours that’s Type 1 diabetic? Her insulin is made using PF. The cheese you buy at the grocery store? The enzymes are made using PF. The vitamin supplement you give your teenager for their skin? PF again. That naturally flavored grapefruit soda you love? That’s right, it’s made using PF.

Here’s the thing. Until Perfect Day and its peers crash landed onto our food scene, most of us had never heard of precision fermentation. Now, this technology that we interact with regularly (though perhaps unknowingly), has been put under the microscope by everyone from chefs to media personalities to lobby groups. When something feels or sounds new, it’s entirely natural to have questions. Particularly when it’s related to the food we eat.

When it comes to animal-free dairy, precision fermentation refers to a process used to produce bio-identical milk proteins like casein or whey, without the use of animals. It is done by encoding milk protein DNA sequences into microorganisms, like yeast or fungi, and then fermenting them with nutrients and sugar in fermentation tanks, much like those used to brew beer. During the fermentation process, these unique microbes produce proteins, identical to those found in cow’s dairy milk. These proteins are filtered into a pure milk protein isolate that can be used to create our favorite dairy products such as cheese, yogurt and ice cream, without the use of animals.

The whole point of using precision fermentation is to produce the dairy products we love (think milk, cheese, yogurt) with a fraction of the carbon emissions, land requirements and water usage that the conventional dairy industry requires. This means the hundreds of millions of people who consume dairy products daily can do so without causing global warming.

 

FACT: Conventional dairy has a global warming problem

Let’s be clear, we are at a critical point in the climate change fight. Unless we significantly reduce the outsized climate impact from conventional agriculture, and that includes dairy farming, we will not be able to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. With half of all habitable land already being used for agriculture and 77% of that devoted to raising animals for food, anyone who is serious about creating a sustainable food industry knows that we cannot go on with the status quo. We certainly cannot nourish a growing global population with an agricultural system that already consumes too much land and water resources and drives biodiversity loss, while also emitting a third of global greenhouse gases. If global animal agriculture continues to expand, it will prevent the decarbonization of our agricultural system and perpetuate the increase of methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more powerful at warming the planet on a 20-year scale than carbon dioxide.

When it comes to conventional dairy production, it’s hard to argue with its environmental cost. Producing just one litre of milk releases 3.15kg of CO2, while one kilo of cheese releases a whopping 23.88kgs of CO2- about the same as burning 10kg of coal!

On the water front, things are not much better. To get one litre of milk requires 628 litres of water. A kilo of cheese demands an incredible 5,606 liters of water, the highest among all foods.

Beyond water and emissions, producing conventional dairy foods involves heavy use of antibiotics, a huge amount of arable land and GMO corn/soy animal feed, not to mention that the fields where these are grown are sprayed with pesticides and glyphosate.

FACT: You are already consuming precision fermentation foods and products

Precision fermentation is safely used to make insulin, most vitamins, flavors and countless enzymes found in nearly all commercially produced foods. We’ve all been eating foods produced with the aid of precision fermentation for decades. This is not new. Here’s an overview of common foods and supplements made using PF:

Enzymes: PF is used to make all sorts of enzymes used in food production, from amlysases to keep bread soft and prevent staleness, pectinases to make fruit juices clear instead of cloudy, transglutaminases to make deli meat products such as salami hold together better.

Vitamins: Almost all of the common vitamins we use to fortify foods (in powder form) or to supplement our own diets (in pill form) such as B vitamins (B2 and B12 in particular) and vitamins A, C, D, E and K, are made via precision fermentation technology.

Natural Flavors: Many flavorings and aromas regularly used in food are made via PF such as vanilla flavoring. When you see the term ‘natural flavors’ on an ingredient list? That’s PF too. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (the FDA)’s own definition of “natural flavor/flavoring” includes ingredients made using precision fermentation.

Medicine: Specifically, insulin for Type 1 Diabetes patients to inject themselves with. Until the 1980s, we used to have to inject diabetes patients with insulin obtained from pigs and cows.

Cheese (this one is ironic, given the conventional dairy industry’s anti-PF stance): Rennet is a key ingredient in most cheeses. It is composed of the enzyme chymosin, which helps to separate the milk solids (the parts used in cheesemaking) from the liquids. In other words, rennet enables the formation of firm curds and is crucial in helping cheesemakers achieve their desired cheese texture. 80% of rennet used in global cheese produced comes from precision fermentation using microorganisms as host factories (the rest comes from the stomachs of ruminant animals). So chances are, if you have eaten dairy cheese, you have eaten PF-made rennet. 

FACT: Animal-free dairy is regulated by the US FDA

Animal-free dairy is a regulated industry. The U.S. FDA oversees and regulates any substance that is intentionally added to food as an additive through the GRAS Notification Program. This is also how enzymes, vitamins and flavors are regulated. To date, both Perfect Day and Remilk have followed this process prior to launching products in the U.S. market.

Animal-free dairy proteins do not fall under the USDA National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, because the final product (animal-free milk protein) does not contain any detectable genetic material.

While genetic engineering techniques are used in creation of the microorganisms that produce the dairy proteins, they are filtered out at the end of fermentation. The resulting product is a high purity milk protein isolate, which is bio-identical to milk protein from cows. 

FACT: Animal-free dairy has a lower carbon and water footprint than conventional dairy

The planetary toll of the conventional industry when we are in the midst of a worsening climate crisis that is threatening our global food security is exactly why we need to rethink how we produce food and support nascent industries like animal-free dairy made from precision fermentation. This will allow consumers to continue enjoying the milk and cheese they crave and love at a lower cost to the planet.

In the RethinkX report on agriculture, the authors write that “modern alternatives will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient, and 10 times more water efficient. They will also produce an order of magnitude less waste.”

According to a Life Cycle Assessment commissioned by Perfect Day, their technology allows for “a reduction in environmental impact of up to 99% less water use, up to 97% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and up to 60% less renewable energy use compared to traditional (dairy) production methods.”

The future of our planet and the ability to feed next generations depends greatly on our ability to bring these new solutions to life. Precision fermentation is part of a broader ecosystem of sustainable food solutions, which include regenerative organic farming, plant-based foods and animal-free dairy. Without them we are at risk of losing the battle against climate change and in the years ahead, we will face unrelenting challenges to affordably feed 10 billion people.

Cost of launches per kg will plunge

SpaceX's Starship fourth launch was a resounding success.  Both the booster and the ship came down for soft landings, even though one of the ship's fins was nearly burnt off by the heat of re-entry.  But compared with the first and second launches, when the Starship/booster combo exploded, and the third launch, when the Starship disintegrated during re-entry, these were huge successes.  Remember, SpaceX learns by iteration.  It tries something, then fixes any errors, then tries again, fixes new problems, tries again, and so on in a continuous program of improvement.  And the logic of the progress so far is that flight five (late July?) will be still more successful.  And flight six after that, and flight seven .....

By the end of this year, Starship will probably be carrying cargo to and from space.  And when it is, it will cut the cost of launching 1 kilo to orbit to around $20.  Musk says that each launch will cost $2 million, and each Starship can lift 100 tonnes into orbit.  Even if you allow for fat profit margins, making that, say $50/kg, it still means that a human weighing 100 kg could go to LEO (low earth orbit) for $5,000.  Though Musk says there will have to be hundreds of accident-free launches before Starship will be considered safe.  

That's just V-1 of Starship.  V-3, which will go into construction in a few months, will be even more efficient.   Its propellant load will increase 20%, but it will double its payload to 200 tonnes.  Cost per kg to orbit will fall to $12/kg.

The chart below, from Our World in Data, shows the cost of launching 1 kg to orbit since 1961, each observation adjusted for inflation since then.    SpaceX's first rocket, Falcon 1, cost $12,600/kg.  It was not re-usable.  The Falcon 9, which had a re-usable booster, but not second stage, cost $2,600/kg, half the cost of its nearest non-reusable competitor.  Falcon Heavy, three Falcon 9 boosters yoked together, cut the cost to $1500/kg.   And Starship V-3 will cut the cost to $20/kg.  Its data point will be right off the bottom of the chart.

It's impossible to know for sure how this will change the world.  But as Tony Seba says, a ten-times cost reduction leads to disruption and opportunity.   Since SpaceX started, it will have engineered a 250 times cost reduction for lifting one kilogram to LEO.   

This opens up the inner solar system to exploration.   The Moon and Mars will be in reach, affordably.  The cost of sending a single Starship to Mars will be $20 million in fuel (it will need 7 propellant ship launches to refuel it in space, each one carrying 200 tonnes of propellant).   Tripling that for food, life systems, etc., gives us a cost per ship of $60 million.  Even if we send 20 ships on the first expedition to Mars, with 10 astronauts per ship, with the rest of the payload devoted to food, shelters, water and air purification plants, rovers, and other things needed for survival on Mars, the total cost would be $1.2 billion.   That's less than half SpaceX's 2023 profit.  SpaceX could fund the first Mars mission with its own money, if it wanted to.

When asked to provide a costing for getting to Mars 20 years ago, in pre-SpaceX days, NASA estimated $100 billion (yes, with a b) for 5 astronauts, in then-money.   Things have come a long way since then.

Tesla Robotaxis. I was wrong.

I've been doubtful that Tesla (or anybody) would ever make an AI which would be able to safely drive a car. Well, I'm eating my words.

From The Driven.

After more than a decade of development on its revolutionary vision based autonomous driving software, Tesla will finally reveal its much anticipated Robotaxi on August 8, 2024.
The Robotaxi unveil will mark the convergence of Tesla’s latest Full Self Driving software and revolutionary 3rd generation vehicle manufacturing and usher in a new era of “Transport as a Service” (TAAS) with massive ramifications for the 70 million unit per annum global fossil car industry.

The announcement comes as the online Tesla community is abuzz with Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta software testers raving about the latest FSD version 12.3.3 update, with drivers reporting zero interventions during long drives in complex city traffic.

Former Tesla employee and YouTuber Farzad Mesbahi discussed the latest software update with James Douma, who’s one of tens of thousands of Tesla drivers in the US who’ve been testing the Beta software over the past two years.

“It’s a pretty remarkable departure in behaviour from V11,” said Douma. “It just works, you just don’t have interventions anymore.”

Douma, who’s been testing the latest update for the last two weeks, says he’s completed hours of city driving without manually overriding the software.

“The first thing I did was spend 3 hours driving all over the part of LA I live in, just random pin drops.” said Douma.

“And I didn’t have any interventions, it was rock solid.”

Another FSD tester and online Tesla blogger Omar Qazi, AKA @WholeMarsBlog, has also been testing FSD beta and has posted some stunning videos of version 12.3.3 in action around San Francisco. 

 

Unlike other companies who’ve attempted to use LiDAR to solve autonomous driving, Tesla’s strategy from the beginning was to use a vision-based system of camera’s and artificial intelligence.

The theory being that humans naturally use vision to drive and navigate the world so why shouldn’t machines? Our road networks are all designed for vision with lines and signs which can be easy read by cameras and AI.

The software is so advanced that it can differentiate between sedans, utes, trucks and buses as well as motorbikes, scooters and bicycles. It can accurately identify pedestrians, traffic cones, wheelie bins and even dogs and place them in 3D space with astonishing precision.

Unlike the purely object based LiDAR system, the cameras can also identify and read traffic signage such as stop signs, traffic lights, speed limits, road works and even the arrows and symbols painted onto road surfaces. For an in-depth look of Tesla’s FSD software development see The Rise of the Machines: Tesla drives 50km autonomously through heavy LA traffic.

Unlike other companies who’ve attempted to use LiDAR to solve autonomous driving, Tesla’s strategy from the beginning was to use a vision-based system of camera’s and artificial intelligence.

The theory being that humans naturally use vision to drive and navigate the world so why shouldn’t machines? Our road networks are all designed for vision with lines and signs which can be easy read by cameras and AI.

The software is so advanced that it can differentiate between sedans, utes, trucks and buses as well as motorbikes, scooters and bicycles. It can accurately identify pedestrians, traffic cones, wheelie bins and even dogs and place them in 3D space with astonishing precision.

Unlike the purely object based LiDAR system, the cameras can also identify and read traffic signage such as stop signs, traffic lights, speed limits, road works and even the arrows and symbols painted onto road surfaces. For an in-depth look of Tesla’s FSD software development see The Rise of the Machines: Tesla drives 50km autonomously through heavy LA traffic.

If Tesla delivers on its August 8th commitment to showcase the self-driving Tesla Robotaxi, it will mark yet another correct prediction made by technology futurist Tony Seba.

Seba, who was interviewed on The Driven podcast last year, predicted in his 2014 book Clean Disruption that lithium-ion batteries would reach $50/kWh by 2027.

That was a forecast that many people said was crazy. However, it now seems Seba’s prediction was too conservative as Chinese battery maker (and Tesla supplier) CATL is likely to reach the milestone by mid-2024.

Despite being considered one of the boldest technology forecasters in the world, Seba has also underestimated the speed of development of battery longevity. In 2017 he predicted the first million-mile battery by 2030 however last week CATL announced a new EV battery with a 1.5 million km warranty, effectively beating Seba’s prediction by 5 years.

On autonomous vehicles Seba had some fascinating insights which he shared during his interview with The Driven.

“The day that we get level four, autonomous technology ready and approved by regulators, when that converges with on-demand, and electric transportation we will get what we call transportation as a service [TAAS].” Seba told The Driven.

“Some call it Robotaxi. Essentially, when that happens the cost per mile of transportation is going to drop by anywhere from 10 to 20 times.”

“So for most people who can barely pay their bills, it won’t make any sense to own a car,” said Seba.

“Do I spend $50,000 over the next five years to own a car? Or do I pay $100 a month for a subscription to transportation as a service?”

Seba says ICE vehicles get around 140,000 miles (225,000 km) over their lifetime. An EV with a 1.5 million km battery will get almost 7 times that amount. This means that EVs will last at least 6-7 times longer than ICE vehicles meaning the global car market will likely drop by over 75% because people won’t need to replace cars as often.

“People are going to be buying vehicles a lot less often. So with that, essentially cut the global vehicle market by a factor of four or five.”

TAAS combined with the million-mile battery will mean new vehicle sales will drop even further as people opt for super cheap electric robotaxi transport instead of spending tens of thousands on private vehicles.

“Either way, it’s pretty much over for internal combustion engine.” says Seba.

I doubt that robotaxis will be the money-spinner Musk says.  If they become that profitable, everyone will buy a Model 3 to make money, and the charges they will be able to levy will go down.  (BTW, I don't think Tesla will be allowed to run a robotaxi monopoly --- but that doesn't mean they won't be able to charge a lot for FSD)  But that only implies that TaaS will take off.  Seba is right.  Why pay a fortune for a car which sits in your driveway or at in a car park for most of its life?  Taxis are expensive because they have to have a human driver and because they're ICEVs.  Robotaxis will be cheap.

Anyway, now I'm convinced.   I was wrong.

CATL announces 1.5 million km battery

From The Driven

The world’s largest battery maker CATL has announced a new electric vehicle battery pack with a 1.5-million kilometre, 15-year warranty. For reference the average Australian passenger car drives less than 15,000 km per year so a 1.5 million km battery would last about 100 years worth of average driving.

The company has joined forces with Yutong Heavy Industries, who will be using the long life battery packs in their buses and heavy vehicles. Yutong, one of China’s largest bus manufacturers, began its first 10-year strategic partnership with CATL in 2012.

According to CnEVPost, CATL and Yutong signed a new 10-year strategic cooperation framework agreement in 2022.

The new lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery will be able to cater to different market segments, including buses, light trucks and heavy trucks, and will be used in future products from Yutong Bus and Yutong Heavy Industries.

According to Don Imrie, who works in the electric bus industry and was interviewed by The Driven in 2023, the average metropolitan bus travels around 300 km per shift which means a 1.5 million km warranty would last around 13 years worth bus shifts driving every day of the year.

The long-life battery will also have zero degradation in the first 1,000 cycles, Yutong said. This effectively means a battery with 500 km of range would have zero capacity degradation for the first half million kilometres.

The new 1.5 million km warranty is the latest in series of breakthroughs coming from CATL. Last year the company announced it would begin mass production of a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg, almost double the energy density of the batteries currently used in Tesla vehicles.

The higher energy density batteries and longer lifecycles are the perfect solution for heavy vehicles such as buses and trucks which do a lot of kilometres and need to carry heavy payloads.

On top of the improved energy density and lifespan, CATL has also significantly reduced production costs over the past 12 months. In January the CATL announced it would reduce the cost per kWh of its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells by a stunning 50 per cent by mid 2024.

The rate at which CATL is reducing battery costs has surprised even technology analysts like Tony Seba, who 10 years ago predicted such low costs would only be reached in 2027.

It has been generally agreed for a decade, that when EV batteries fell to $100/kWh, the up-front cost disadvantage of EVs relative to ICEVs (petrol/diesel cars) would disappear.  Battery packs costing $50/kWh will mean that EVs will be not just cheaper to run (it's been that way for a while) but cheaper to buy too.  Which means in turn (a) that within the next 20 years, or less, emissions from land transport, currently ~20% of total emissions will end, and (b) that oil demand will plummet.

One final point:  Tony Seba was right.  Legacy auto executives didn't listen to him, and as a result are having to scurry to politicians to get protection from imported EVs, because they were too feckless and arrogant to move into EVs when it became obvious, a decade ago, that EVs were going to end up dominating the market.  He's made similar predictions about precision fermentation.  He's likely to be right here, too.   And that has massive implications for emissions and for farming.

Battery prices to halve this year

 From The Electric Viking

CATL is the world's largest lithium-ion battery maker.  According to The Electric Viking, they expect to halve battery prices this year, as well as to speed-up charging three-fold, and have better cold-weather performance, with battery prices reaching $50 per kWh.    Tony Seba's forecast made in 2014 is coming true 3 years early. 

 

Let's start with the cow

From a tweet thread by Tony Seba

Let me start with #insulin. In the 1970s, insulin was extracted from the pancreas of animals. In the 1980s, @Genentech, working with Eli Lilly (@LillyPad), developed insulin using a new technology that I call #PrecisionFermentation. It wasn’t animal insulin. It was human insulin.

The mainstream would say: “health care is slow, it can’t be disrupted.” Well, here’s the S-curve of #PrecisionFermentation human insulin. Human insulin disrupted animal insulin in about 13 years.









#PrecisionFermentation is a concept that I coined in my  @rethink_x report ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture’ with @CatherineTubb in September 2019.

Think about beer #fermentation. You take a microorganism (a yeast) and feed it sugar, wheat, nitrogen.. and out comes beer.

The difference with #PrecisionFermentation: you genetically modify the yeast, so it can produce the ingredient you want. In this case, a #protein.

The #protein itself cannot be #GeneticallyModified. The yeast is, but there’s no genetic material in proteins. None. Anyone who tells you “#GMOprotein” is lying to you. Proteins have exactly no generic material.

How is #PrecisionFermentation going to disrupt #milk? — Milk is almost 90% water. 3.3% of milk is #proteins, and that is the commercially valuable part of #dairy. So, essentially, you disrupt 3% of that milk bottle and the entire dairy industry is gone.

The #PrecisionFermentation disruption of #dairy is a #B2B ingredient #disruption. No consumer behavior change is needed. All the industry needs to do is disrupt protein shakes, protein bars etc. and ⅓ of #dairy industry revenues go away.

This technology has existed for 40 years and they’ve gone through an incredible capability cost curve. #PrecisionFermentation dairy proteins are already in the market (cheese, chocolate, ice cream etc). This is not in the future. This is now.

To give you an idea of the cost curve of #PrecisionFermentation, between 2000 and 2020, the cost per kilo/pound went down by about 10,000x in 20 years from ~$1m to ~$100. That cost curve makes #MooresLaw (computing) look like a straight line into the future.




Over the next ten years, we’re going to experience the #disruption of #food and #agriculture. And I am going to focus on the cow.

Because the cow is — by far — the most inefficient food production technology on the planet.

Every #animal that we use for #livestock is going to be #disrupted. If the cost curve keeps improving the way it has over the last few decades, the cost-per-kilo of #PrecisionFermentation proteins will reach price parity with the cow by ~2025. That’s only three years away.

We know that in #food and #ingredients, #disruptions happen quickly and they happen as S-curves. Think about Pepsi and Coca Cola. In the 1980s, in the United States, they went from all cane sugar to all corn-based sugar in only four years.

This is not a “veggie revolution”.  What is happening today is the ‘Second Domestication of Plants and Animals’. We’re going from domesticating large organisms — cow sheep horse chicken — to microorganisms as a source of food.

#PrecisionFermentation proteins are 5-100x more resource-efficient than the cow. #PFproteins, casein and whey, can be made today using 100x less land than the cow. Think about it. 100x less land.

An Israeli company called @Remilk_Foods announced that they’re going to open the world’s largest facility to create cow-free milk in Denmark. They’re going to make the dairy equivalent of 50,000 cows on 750,000 sq-ft = a standard industrial-size facility. A fermentation farm.

Canada’s dairy industry has about 1 million cows (whole country). Take 20 @Remilk_Foods facilities, i.e. #PrecisionFermentation farms, and they could produce the equivalent of 1m cows. This would take 344 acres and disrupt the whole dairy industry in Canada. That’s it. Gone!

How quickly is this going to happen? — The CEO of @Remilk_Foods says they can produce dairy as cheap as animal protein by 2024, which is within the cost curve that I published 3 years ago. That’s only 3 years away, not 20 or 30 as the mainstream would suggest. We need to prepare.

#FermentationFarms are the new #FoodFarms where we are going to create our proteins. New business model innovations and possibilities will open up, in this case, for example: #FoodAsSoftware.

The #proteins we eat today come from just a few #plants and #animals that we domesticated thousands of years ago. 12 plants and 5 animals account for 75% of food. There are millions of plants & animals on Earth. There’s a huge possibility space out there. #PrecisionFermentation

With #FoodAsSoftware and #PrecisionFermentation, we can make proteins from any animal, from any plant, at speed and scale. The number of possible #proteins mathematically is infinite. I did the numbers. It is larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

And it’s not just about the cow. It’s not even about food. #PrecisionFermentation is disruptive across many sectors. It’s being used for #cosmetics. #Collagen, for instance. #HumanCollagen is being made with precision fermentation. Today!

#SweetProteins are going to be so disruptive! One of those proteins — #brazzein — is ~1000x sweeter than cane sugar. 1 pound of brazzein can sweeten the equivalent of 1000 pounds of sugar. Think about that! Without the #insulin reaction.

The magic #ingredient that makes  @ImpossibleFoods’ meat smell and taste like meat is #heme. Heme is only 2% of their burgers. Think about how  @generalelectric got disrupted with only 2% market penetration of solar, wind & batteries (#SWB). Same thing is happening with #meat.

And you may think: “will this fly in x” or “will they eat it in #Texas?” — Yes, they will. I was at the airport in #Houston, and sure enough, they’re selling #ImpossibleNachos & #ImpossibleQuesadillas. And the menu doesn’t even say it’s vegetarian.








This is not just the #disruption of the cow. This is the disruption of all food that comes from animals: pork, fish eggs etc. All of them can be, and will be, disrupted by #PrecisionFermentation and #FoodAsSoftware.

I expect three phases in the “#Disruption of #Food & #Agriculture”. What we’re undergoing now is the first phase, which is #ingredients, #B2B etc.

The second phase, which starts around 2024, is more complex proteins & meats that will be made with #PrecisionFermentation, and later, #CellularAgriculture.

I expect that the animal extraction industry, the livestock-as-food industry, will be gone by 2035. It’s pretty much over. I expect the dairy industry to be bankrupt by 2030 — that’s less than 10 years away — and the whole livestock industry by 2035.

That doesn’t mean you can’t eat a cow after 2035. You can, but it’s going to be a little bit like the horse and the car. You can still ride horses, but it’s not a mainstream form of transportation, and it’s very expensive. Eating cows will be just like owning a horse today


For those of you who think Tony Seba's views are way out there .... you're wrong. He has consistently called it right for at least a decade. He understands that new technologies grow *exponentially*, not linearly.  And given how high emissions from beef, mutton and other meats are, this could save the world.  Because if we're all eating vat meat and vat eggs and drinking vat milk, then all that land freed up by ending animal husbandry will be able to revert to forest.  And that will be the most powerful carbon capture and storage process we could have.

Solar -- the fastest energy change in history

 An optimistic video from The Electric Viking.  He makes many points I've repeatedly made:

• solar is the cheapest energy source now, and is getting cheaper
• batteries are getting cheaper too, and new technologies are driving the cost curve down
• growth rates of 25% per annum will lead to 100% penetration within a decade
• There's plenty of space to put wind and solar, because of dual use, e.g., rooftops
• Most of the world is in the "sun belt", and if solar is cost-effective in Europe, imagine how cost-effective it is in Africa, SE Asia, Southern Europe, etc.
• Tony Seba got it right, even though all the naysayers said he was a lunatic.

 

Of course, it's more complicated than this, and lots of my articles cover the complexities.

The green technology that could save us all

From The Guardian

So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal.

Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us, is to reach the critical mass that triggers a social tipping point. But, as every protester knows, this is only part of the challenge. We also need to translate our demands into action, which requires political, economic, cultural and technological change. All are necessary, none are sufficient. Only together can they amount to the change we need to see.

Let’s focus for a moment on technology. Specifically, what might be the most important environmental technology ever developed: precision fermentation.

Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods.

The developments I find most interesting use no agricultural feedstocks. The microbes they breed feed on hydrogen or methanol – which can be made with renewable electricity – combined with water, carbon dioxide and a very small amount of fertiliser. They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve (soy beans contain 37%, chick peas, 20%). When they are bred to produce specific proteins and fats, they can create much better replacements than plant products for meat, fish, milk and eggs. And they have the potential to do two astonishing things.

The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.

If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale. By rewilding the vast tracts now occupied by livestock (by far the greatest of all human land uses) or by the crops used to feed them – as well as the seas being trawled or gill-netted to destruction – and restoring forests, wetlands, savannahs, natural grasslands, mangroves, reefs and sea floors, we could both stop the sixth great extinction and draw down much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere.

The second astonishing possibility is breaking the extreme dependency of many nations on food shipped from distant places. Nations in the Middle East, north Africa, the Horn of Africa and Central America do not possess sufficient fertile land or water to grow enough food of their own. In other places, especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a combination of soil degradation, population growth and dietary change cancels out any gains in yield. But all the nations most vulnerable to food insecurity are rich in something else: sunlight. This is the feedstock required to sustain food production based on hydrogen and methanol.

Precision fermentation is at the top of its price curve, and has great potential for steep reductions. Farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) is at the bottom of its price curve: it has pushed these creatures to their limits, and sometimes beyond. If production is distributed (which I believe is essential), every town could have an autonomous microbial brewery, making cheap protein-rich foods tailored to local markets. This technology could, in many nations, deliver food security more effectively than farming can.

There are four main objections. The first is “Yuck, bacteria!” Well, tough, you eat them with every meal. In fact, we deliberately introduce live ones into some of our foods, such as cheese and yoghurt. And take a look at the intensive animal factories that produce most of the meat and eggs we eat and the slaughterhouses that serve them, both of which the new technology could make redundant.

The second objection is that these flours could be used to make ultra-processed foods. Yes, like wheat flour, they could. But they can also be used to radically reduce the processing involved in making substitutes for animal products, especially if the microbes are gene-edited to produce specific proteins.

This brings us to the third objection. There are major problems with certain genetically modified crops such as Roundup Ready maize, whose main purpose was to enlarge the market for a proprietary herbicide, and the dominance of the company that produced it. But GM microbes have been used uncontroversially in precision fermentation since the 1970s to produce insulin, the rennet substitute chymosin and vitamins. There is a real and terrifying genetic contamination crisis in the food industry, but it arises from business as usual: the spread of antibiotic resistance genes from livestock slurry tanks, into the soil and thence into the food chain and the living world. GM microbes paradoxically offer our best hope of stopping genetic contamination.

The fourth objection has more weight: the potential for these new technologies to be captured by a few corporations. The risk is real and we should engage with it now, demanding a new food economy that’s radically different from the existing one, in which extreme consolidation has already taken place. But this is not an argument against the technology itself, any more than the dangerous concentration in the global grain trade (90% of it in the hands of four corporations) is an argument against trading grain, without which billions would starve.

The real sticking point, I believe, is neophobia. I know people who won’t own a microwave oven, as they believe it will damage their health (it doesn’t), but who do own a woodburning stove, which does. We defend the old and revile the new. Much of the time, it should be the other way around.

I’ve given my support to a new campaign, called Reboot Food, to make the case for the new technologies that could help pull us out of our disastrous spiral. We hope to ferment a revolution.

[George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist]

Source: Precision Fermentation: What exactly is it?

100% EVs by 2025?

From a Twitter thread by Professor Ray Wills, who along with Tony Seba, has been consistently right with his forecasts for the growth in EV sales.  He has been even more optimistic than me, and I was very optimistic.  In mid-2016, when EV/PHEV sales were just 1% of global car sales, I forecast that they would reach 16% in 2022.  They reached 10% in 2021, and at current growth rates should hit ±16% in 2022.  The problem with most forecasters is that they extend lines linearly instead of exponentially.  If something is growing by 50% per annum,  it goes up 10-fold every 5 and a half years.  EV sales are growing by 70% per annum, while total car and commercial vehicle sales are falling.  Wills's forecast of an end to ICEV sales by 2025 seems perfectly plausible.  

Sales of electric cars hit 6.6m in 2021

> 3X EVs market share from 2019

> 2X 2020

16m #EVs on the road worldwide

More #EVs now sold every week than in the whole of 2012

But overall car sales are still falling

We hit peak car in 2017 

WEForum article.

    

Note that these are sales of EVs only, and do not include PHEVs

Note how hybrids are falling and how (B)EVs are now dominant

China is 1/3rd of the global car/light truck market

Full self driving (level 5) by 2027!  Transport as a service (TaaS) takes off.

EVs price competitive with petrol by 2023

 Ray Wills, an Ozzie futurist, has long had as optimistic forecasts as Tony Seba for battery and EV cost declines and EV take-up rates.  Both their forecasts have turned out to be on the mark, while other more conservative forecasters, including BNEF, have underestimated just how rapidly EVs are going to gain market share.

From The Age

Electric cars will hit price parity with petrol by 2023 and be the only cars produced by 2026, while many city petrol stations will be obsolete within a decade, says a Perth 'futurist'.  Ray Wills is managing director of advisory firm Future Smart Strategies, which examines the growth of commodities in the marketplace.

Professor Wills, who is also a board member of remote energy services provider Horizon Power and former chief executive of the Sustainable Energy Association of Australia, said anyone thinking of buying a car would be well advised to wait a few years if possible.

“The future is coming faster than we think,” he said.  “And when it arrives, we always say it was faster than we thought.”

Future Smart had been modelling since 2012 and its models had been “robust” since 2014, he said.  It also “post-casted”, evaluating previous performance.  In 2015, Future Smart Strategies projected 1.85 million EVs would be sold globally in 2018; it turned out to be 2.02 million.

Professor Wills said his models, while more aggressive than those of traditional forecasters such as Bloomberg and Deloitte, were less so than his nearest neighbour in approach, Stanford University’s Tony Seba, who had estimated EVs would be the only vehicles produced by 2025.

He said the disruptive power of electrics was visible in their eclipse of hybrids: for the past decade, 1.5 million hybrids had been sold. More EVs than that were sold in 2018 alone.

“When you see a disrupted market, it’s the thing that has the momentum that rules the day,” he said.  “Nobody will ever be exactly right. But I have been labelled as a futurist and the art of a futurist is to be the least wrong.”

Professor Wills said last year, the global car industry announced a total $400 billion investment into EVs and in addition so far this year, another $100 billion forward investment up to 2025. Volkswagen had announced in excess of $40 billion. Even Toyota, a “laggard” until recently, in May announced a $20 billion forward investment on EVs and advanced plans for electrification by five years.

“Is there a factory specially set up for Australia? No. Australia will buy what the world builds,” he said.

“Electrification as I see it will be virtually complete by 2026, the only cars built in my opinion will be electric, with the exception of some specialist bespoke vehicles.”

He said the average age of the 18 million cars in the Australian fleet was 10 years. He predicted 5 per cent of them would be replaced by EVs by the early 2020s, 50 per cent by 2036 and almost all of them by 2046.  Currently the cheapest EV in Australia was the Nissan Leaf, costing $50-70,000, and while there was no doubt that people would wait until EVs were affordable to buy one, he said by 2022-3 they would be in the $20,000 range.

While still dearer than a comparative petrol car, they would save $1000 per year on fuel costs which would outstrip the additional initial outlay within two years, he said.  Professor Wills said the only car market in Australia growing was EVs; petrol car sales had stalled for 18 months and while economic conditions were part of it, he believed there was more to it than that.

“It’s seen with iPhone models ... we will hold on to the old one if we know a new one is coming," he said.  “People are thinking, I will wait and see what happens. Once EVs are here combustion [car] prices will fall ... at some point they will become unsellable and that’s the point people won’t want to get caught in. It’ll be like buying a flip phone. People will know there’s a better option.”

He said anywhere you could plug in a hair dryer, you could plug in an EV.

"On the street you’ll need a little infrastructure,” he said.  “[But] it’s not an NBN rollout ... it’s not a $40 billion project, more like a $4 billion project.”

Petrol sales would thus be eroded and Australia would generate electricity for cars using local, renewable energy power plants, freed of the need to import $15 billion annually in oil and oil products for motor cars.

“Over the past 20-30 years, as we’ve gone to a self-serve petrol station then pay at pump, we lost all the corner store type stations ... replaced by the big main road stations,” he said.

“Next step will be a rationalisation of larger volume petrol stations. In the 2020s you will see some older petrol stations closing instead of being upgraded. The biggest ones will be the best protected and as the petrol and diesel market is eroded you’ll see the attrition of the outlets, just as the internet has eroded retail sales.”

On regional highways and national highways they would continue to operate as fast charging points.

“Australians will still have “range anxiety”, it’s prevalent here because of the distances, but there are already vehicles that can do 400 miles without a charge, and most of us can’t do that without a pee,” he said.  “You’ll need to recharge yourself before you’ll need to charge that car. Right now, 150KW is less than an hour; a stop for a tea, a pie and a tinkle.”

Key to the puzzle would be the arrival of electrified trucks, he said, and that would be a clearer situation within two years.  China was rolling out all buses, trucks and taxis to be electric, both for energy efficiency and air quality; building 181 electric buses per day. Australia had 36 electric buses in operation, by comparison.

The Tesla Model 2 US$25K hatchback

Lab-grown food will save the planet

We know that we can transition electricity generation to renewables, and that process is now well under way.  By 2030, there won't be that many coal power stations left, because they will simply be too expensive compared to renewables plus storage. 

We know that, at some point quite soon, EVs will start to outsell petrol(gasoline)/diesel cars (ICEVs, which stands for 'internal combustion engined vehicles'), again because their up-front costs will fall below those of ICEVs as battery costs fall.  By 2030 at the latest, it is likely that EVs will make up 90%+ of total car/lorry/bus sales.  

We can produce carbon-free cement and iron/steel.  We will prolly, by 2030, have carbon-free sea and air transport.

What will be left then is agriculture. Agriculture is responsible for something between 24% and 30% of greenhouse gases emitted across the world.  And most of that comes from producing meat and milk.  Most people won't give these up, and in developing countries, rising meat consumption as living standards increase is likely to blow our carbon budget out of the water.  

Source: The Guardian, Illustration: Matt Kenyon

Here's an extremely interesting piece by George Monbiot in The Guardian bout how lab-grown food will save the climate and the world.  

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.

Several impending disasters are converging on our food supply, any of which could be catastrophic. Climate breakdown threatens to cause what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures”, through synchronous heatwaves and other impacts. The UN forecasts that by 2050 feeding the world will require a 20% expansion in agriculture’s global water use. But water use is already maxed out in many places: aquifers are vanishing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. The glaciers that supply half the population of Asia are rapidly retreating. Inevitable global heating – due to greenhouse gases already released – is likely to reduce dry season rainfall in critical areas, turning fertile plains into dustbowls.

A global soil crisis threatens the very basis of our subsistence, as great tracts of arable land lose their fertility through erosion, compaction and contamination. Phosphate supplies, crucial for agriculture, are dwindling fast. Insectageddon threatens catastrophic pollination failures. It is hard to see how farming can feed us all even until 2050, let alone to the end of the century and beyond.

Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution. Across vast tracts of the world’s surface, it has replaced complex wild ecosystems with simplified human food chains. Industrial fishing is driving cascading ecological collapse in seas around the world. Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost.

But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale. It means an end to the exploitation of animals, an end to most deforestation, a massive reduction in the use of pesticides and fertiliser, the end of trawlers and longliners. It’s our best hope of stopping what some have called the “sixth great extinction”, but I prefer to call the great extermination. And, if it’s done right, it means cheap and abundant food for everyone.

Research by the thinktank RethinkX suggests that proteins from precision fermentation will be around 10 times cheaper than animal protein by 2035. The result, it says, will be the near-complete collapse of the livestock industry. The new food economy will “replace an extravagantly inefficient system that requires enormous quantities of inputs and produces huge amounts of waste with one that is precise, targeted, and tractable”. Using tiny areas of land, with a massively reduced requirement for water and nutrients, it “presents the greatest opportunity for environmental restoration in human history”.

Not only will food be cheaper, it will also be healthier. Because farmfree foods will be built up from simple ingredients, rather than broken down from complex ones, allergens, hard fats and other unhealthy components can be screened out. Meat will still be meat, though it will be grown in factories on collagen scaffolds, rather than in the bodies of animals. Starch will still be starch, fats will still be fats. But food is likely to be better, cheaper and much less damaging to the living planet.

Farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger. But there is a hitch: a clash between consumer and producer interests. Many millions of people, working in farming and food processing, will eventually lose their jobs. Because the new processes are so efficient, the employment they create won’t match the employment they destroy.

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035. 

[There's more, which you can read here]

For years I have wondered how it would be possible for passengers and crew on space stations and space ships, and on lifeless worlds like Mars or the Moon, to eat meat, fish or dairy.  The space and resources needed are simply impractical.  Lois McMaster Bujold, in her SF novels, talks about vat-meat, vat-chicken and vat-milk, and it is obvious that this is what will happen.  But it's equally likely that this will happen on Earth, too, as Monbiot points out.  Climate change, insectageddon, water shortages—everything points to the inevitable future where our meat and milk doesn't come from cows and pigs and chickens but from proteins grown in labs.  On top of which, it will be cheaper.  An order of magnitude cheaper.  We will be able to end world hunger, permanently.

This trend is starting now—even before we have food grown from bacteria.  I am a vegetarian, and I haven't eaten meat for 40 years.  To be honest, the very idea revolts me, these days.  So when I had one of the new, meat-like vegetarian burgers, which tasted like meat, "bled" like meat, and had a meat-like texture, I was rather put off!  But if you want to stop the horrible cruelty to animals which meat production involves, and if you want to reduce your carbon emissions now, by a good 20%, then you should try them. 

We need to start cutting emissions this year, and ramp up the reductions each year until we get to zero.  We need to stop exterminating insects.  We need to restore the soil.  These are compelling and vital steps, and we cannot dither and phaff any more.  To quote Churchill:  Action this day.

See also:

Imitation & vat meats the norm by 2040

Would giving up meat help the environment?

Agriculture's carbon footprint