Does this mean you can control the chain length, amount of saturated fat, etc. This does sound really cool. Hope it works out. I guess it works out if it is the cheapest butter on the shelf since that is what motivates many people!

This reminds me a bit of single cell protein, a technology that is also driven by fossil fuel chemical energy. It was used to make animal feed, but ended up being uncompetitive.

Technologies like this are ways to monetize stranded natural gas that would otherwise be flared. It's in competition with other means of using that gas or getting that gas to market (ammonia, methanol, electrical energy, LNG, etc.)

Eventually they could make this from captured CO2 and green hydrogen, but that's clearly not competitive with cheap gas (without CO2 charges) at this point.

The science behind it sounds cool but I don’t think they realize that being associated with Bill Gates is enough to make a lot of people suspicious.

It requires a lecithin emulsifier and then is "naturally" (artificially) flavored and colored? No thanks.

Is there a technical report? Fats have a very specific structure that mix some oxygen in the carbon chain and they are probably very hard to get by inorganic reactions.