You’re right, but I am curious whether they’ll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.

And they’re specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they’re looking for.

It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I’m not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).

This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.

That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.