Preface. Meat production from animals uses a great deal of energy to produce, distribute, and refrigerate. Crops must be grown that erode soil and drain aquifers. Unfortunately, lab grown meat uses even more energy and also requires crops to extract nutrients to grow the meat as well as fossil fuel process heat, fossil produced electricity, fossil-based petrochemicals, buildings, lighting and more.
It is hard to actually know the full energy, environmental, and material impact of lab-grown meat because it is so new, and privately owned that the full life cycle is a mystery.
In 1961 production was 70.6 million tons, in 2020 337.2 million tons, nearly five times higher. Poultry was 39%, pork 32%, beef 22%. And demand is expected to double by 2050 so clearly lab grown meat would help feed all the new comers.
But cell-based meat is expected to consume more energy and produce more carbon dioxide than potent methane from livestock (Roy 2021).
A great deal more research is required to optimize cell culture and reproduce the wide variety of meats from different animals, the health benefits and drawbacks, nutritional composition, whether they can compete with much cheaper plant-based alternatives and more (Chriki 2020).
Risner (2023) take a crack at it by just looking at what the lab culture process would likely be, but it isn’t a conclusive, or peer-reviewed paper because so much of the process is secret. Meat replacement with land-based and fermentation-based proteins has been commercial for several decades. Animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or “cultured meat” is so recent that commercial amounts are not available yet. Hype about it has raised over $2 billion in investment money so far, with happy talk of 60 to 70% replacement of animal meat by 2030-2040 but lately predictions have been more modest, perhaps half a percent with ACBM by 2030. ACBM is tricky because endotoxins must be removed as well as dozens of other issues, clearly this is a technology that may not be ready by 2030, if ever, read the paper and see for yourself. It is complicated and they only look at a small fraction of the overall process.
Another paper that looks at the issues and complexities is Escobar (2021).
Surely this is a far too complex and energy-intense technology to survive energy decline. It is dependent on fossil fuels and the electric grid (which is also dependent on fossil fuels with only a small fraction of electricity from wind and solar), as are the microchips, diesel transportation and manufacturing lab-grown meat require as well as part of their life cycle.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Klein A (2023) Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef. Analysis finds the carbon footprint of cultivated meat is likely to be higher than beef if current production methods are scaled up because they are still highly energy-intensive. NewScientist.com
Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
Lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a scaffold in a nutrient-rich broth. It has been proposed as a kinder and greener alternative to traditional meat because it uses less land, feed, water and antibiotics than animal farming and removes the need to farm and slaughter livestock, which are a major source of greenhouse gases.
However, Derrick Risner at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues found that the global warming potential of cultivated meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced, is 4 to 25 times higher than for regular beef.
The researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of cultivated meat that estimated the energy used in each step in current production methods. They predict that this will be similar regardless of which animal’s cells are being cultivated.
They found that the nutrient broth used to culture the animal cells has a large carbon footprint because it contains components like sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each come with energy costs. Energy is required to grow crops for sugars and to run laboratories that extract growth factors from cells. Each component must also be carefully purified using energy-intensive techniques like ultrafiltration and chromatography before they can be mixed into the broth.
This “pharmaceutical-grade” level of purification is required so that there are no contaminants such as bacteria or their associated toxins in the broth, says Risner. “Otherwise the animal cells won’t grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster,” he says.
At the moment, all cultivated meat is grown in pharmaceutical-grade nutrient broths, but the Good Food Institute told New Scientist that “cultivated meat companies are moving towards an input supply chain that is suitable for use in food production, rather than built for pharmaceuticals”, which will reduce the cost and energy required.
Risner says he is dubious about whether this will be possible because even trace levels of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures. Nevertheless, it may be possible in the future to engineer animal cells that are more resilient to contaminants, he says.
These are issues that urgently need to be addressed before lab-grown meat is scaled up to industrial production, says Risner. “$2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t actually know if it’s going to be better for the environment,” he says.
References
Chriki S et al (2020) The myth of cultured meat: A review. Frontiers Nutrition & food science technology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2020.00007
Escobar MIR et al (2021) Analysis of the Cultured Meat Production System in Function of Its Environmental Footprint: Current Status, Gaps and Recommendations. Foods. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10122941
Risner D et al (2023) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778
Roy B et al (2021) A review on lab-grown meat: Advantages and disadvantages. Quest International Journal of Medical and Health Sciences. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5201528