In the future, it will be able to replace meat, milk and soy. For now they plan to feed it to animals
Chinese scientists have learned to convert ordinary coal into food protein. It is stated that they plan to use it as food for animals, not people, at least at the first stage. Now the main task of development — provide feed with a high content of vegetable protein to livestock. It is expected that this will free up for other purposes a large amount of agricultural land that is usually used for growing fodder crops.
Scientists from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have figured out how to turn coal into methanol, into which they then place a strain of yeast Pichia pastoris. Yeast ferments methanol, resulting in a single-cell protein containing a number of amino acids, vitamins, inorganic salts, fats and carbohydrates. This nutritional value allows it to be used as a partial replacement for fishmeal, soybeans, meat and skim milk powder in a variety of applications, according to the product's creators. It is possible that in the future we will talk about feeding «protein from coal» not only animals, but also humans.
At the moment, the efficiency of the protein creation process has been increased to 92% of the maximum theoretically calculated value. «It is a thousand times more effective than traditional farming methods», — said the leader of the research team, Professor Wu Xin. Scientists have already contacted an unnamed company that will help demonstrate the development on an industrial scale and produce thousands of tons of such protein in a factory.