> Solein® is made from natural single-cell organisms, which are grown in a fermentation process. Water is split from the air with renewable electricity into hydrogen and oxygen. The cells are fed CO2 from the air, hydrogen and mineral nutrients.
There is no nitrogen mentioned in this explanation. You cannot make amino acids or proteins without nitrogen. These organism either have to be able to do nitrogen-fixation from the air, which is a really difficult and energy-intensive process or the nitrogen has to come from some growth medium. It certainly doesn't make a good first impression that they "forgot" such an important part in this description.
In general the interesting part of such a scheme is how much energy it uses. Converting CO2 to organic molecules and nitrogen-fixation are very energy-intensive processes, the problem isn't that we can't do this but that the amount of energy is incredibly expensive compared to using photosynthesis in plants.
You have to wonder why they didn't just jack into their local instance of the Matrix to eat lunch, while the goop goes in through a food tube or whatever.
Yes! That's long been my biggest criticism of The Matrix, much more than the whole "but humans would make terrible batteries" thing.
The whole motivation of Cypher is because he wants to be plugged back in, and the movie presents it as him being sick and tired and the drab life aboard the ship. But they literally have a VR env that is completely realistic, and can give them any experience they want. The best food, the best entertainment, the "Lady in Red", etc.
> "but humans would make terrible batteries" thing
I'm not sure if you actually know this, but AFAIK initially the script writers wanted it to be 'the human brain as CPU' but the studio was afraid the general movie populace (back in 1999) wouldn't know what a CPU was and thus wouldn't jive with it.
Because it wasn't real. Cypher says ignorance is bliss but that's the opposite that everyone else feels. They'd rather eat slop they know is real. Even the suggestion of trying to go back to the Matrix willingly was seen as a betrayal. Mouse offers to set up a private meeting between Neo and the Lady in Red but he doesn't accept and we never heard of anyone else accepting.
But indeed, if they had the _option_ to escape from reality from time to time, people like Cypher would be happier (I know I am when I do it :D). Indeed the irony of partaking precisely in the thing that you fight against is there; however, what they actually fight against is the enslavement by it, not the casual enjoyment of it: it's bad to be a medieval serf forced to toil the soil, it's quite another thing to play gardener to take your mind off the day..
They have an unsophisticated, binary view of the world (for plot reasons, I guess) while some nuance and tolerance would have had made a more realistic and_human_take on the situation.
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Agent Smith: Then we have a deal?
Cypher: I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important. Like an actor.
Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.
Cypher: Okay. I get my body back into a power plant, re-insert me into the Matrix, I’ll get you what you want.
Cypher didn't just want to eat fake steak, to him that wasn't enough. Ignorance is bliss. He wanted to eat fake steak and not know that it was fake.
To add to this, in most media that shows virtual reality, people who are addicted to it are also shown. Those people, even knowing it is not real, still enjoy riding roller coasters or whatever. Yet in The Matrix franchise there isn't a single person (that I know of) that is addicted to training programs or some such.
The biggest thing cypher wanted was to forget first, that’s the only way he could handle it after knowing the truth. Unreal can never be as good as real.
i'm wondering if it's a complete protein or not. a lot of plant proteins are low or lack methionene tryptophan and lysine, also are kinda lower in isoleucine and valine. a complete plant based protein that's not soy would be nice.
It has A, B, C, D... (Without the "and" before D, it is arguable -- especially for those that like clarity of language -- but people do sometimes drop the "and" in casual speech)
Slightly confused as to what you guys disagree about, but I think it is a list where the listed elements provide the main examples and the final is a catch-all.
Like if a mechanic said "We service Fords, Toyotas, Hondas, all the well known brands" it wouldn't imply that those three were the only major brands.
nowadays there is a lot of interest[1] in the older and less-efficient Birkeland–Eyde process because you can scale it to the size of a trailer and deploy it on-site to farms: https://www.nitricity.co/
Blue green algae (cyanobacteria) can fix nitrogen from the air. There are other symbiotic bacteria that do the same in nodules inside of plant's roots (like legumes).
Not sure how this is Nobel Prize worthy. I've grown blue green algae and legumes at home.
“Solar Foods is a Finland-based start-up company that utilises CO2 captured from air, water and some minerals as sole raw materials to produce a protein powder using renewable electricity.
Branded as Solein®, the product is a microbial protein (also referred to as single cell protein, SCP) obtained by growing proprietary bacteria harvested from nature, in specially designed bioreactors using gas fermentation.”
Not that surprising that you won’t find the word “bacteria” anywhere on a marketing site, but wish they were at least more up front with exactly how their process is “more efficient than plants”.
Hmm, obviously cyanobacteria like Spirulina[1] "utilize CO2 captured from air" along with "water and some minerals" and sunlight to make sugars and proteins which people can eat. Not sure I'd describe that as 'fermentation' though if you do anything in a big vat it's a bioreactor and not just... a big vat, apparently.
Spirulina is a staple foodstuff in some places, is it plausible that the side effects you are suggesting are from someone not adjusted to eating it or contaminations from other cyanobacteria that are known to cause digestion issues?
… Which makes knowing what microbe it’s using even more interesting. I mean, H2-eating microbes are quite common (and are likely how life started around seabed thermal vents), but making these things edible?
There's no reason they wouldn't be edible. Things are usually inedible because either they have some compound that's meant to be very durable (lignin in wood), they have evolved to be poisonous (many plants and fungi). A H2-eating microbe probably has no reason to evolve either property.
It's kind of mind-blowing they're apparently so cognizant of not using the word "bacteria", yet they're perfectly fine with referring to their Soylent-esque magic protein dust as "SCP".
1) By keeping the bacteria a secret: not telling which bacteria can be used like this, not telling where you can find it in the nature, not giving anyone a piece of the bacteria culture to use.
2) By patenting the industrial process that makes use of the bacteria, thus gaining an exclusive commercial right to it.
Now CA3153196A1 is the interesting one as it names Xanthobacter sp. VTT-E-193585 as the strain of interest. You even get a 16S rRNA sequence with it for doing some taxonomy! This is not to be confused with FI129574B involving a similar but genetically modified bacterium.
Most vegetation is made out of air and water. Mostly air. C, O, and N come from air. H comes from water, and some of that comes from water in air. The inputs from dirt are under 5% of plant mass. They have to be, or farms would dig holes in the ground.
Feynman talk on this.[1]
So, with that out of the way, what does this company actually have?
* They have a cool web site with no useful info.
* They have another web site with useful info.[2]
* You can't even order samples of the product.
* They have a useful Wikipedia article.[3]
* It's a fermentation process, so it takes heat and water, not just air.
* They've been around since at least 2019 and have burned through about $20 million in funding.
Not to be incredibly nit-picky, but the costs of the product right now don’t matter nearly as much as the ability to scale production and variable unit costs.
As a ‘hard tech’, they need to work themselves through the technology readiness framework before the cost of a particular material even tells you anything of value.
The competition would be carbon neutral pesticide free soybeans, which I'm not sure are readily available? Soybeans also typically use energy intensive nitrogen fertilizers, which I'm not sure this process requires. (It might, not sure.)
Also, soybeans need to be shipped from fertile areas. This could be produced in situ in infertile areas.
I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it has some benefits over traditional intensive agriculture.
Is it actually standard practice to use nitrogen fertilizers with soybeans? Soy is a nitrogen fixer and I've read that nitrogen fertilizers often reduce yields for soybeans because it interferes with nodulation and undermines that plant's nitrogen fixing capacities.
Apparently soybeans are often grown in a double-cropping rotation, in which maize is planted first (along with N and P fertilization), and then no additional fertilizer is applied to the following soybean crop.
This seems to be a comprehensive discussion (for South Dakota farmers anyway, pdf):
Making use of nitrogen fixing plants alleviates the need of fertilization. An easy one: clover. Bees also love clover. However you can explore other systems of cover cropping (I recall Diakon radishes draw up nitrogen from down low, up to the surface) which you terminate before seeding your main crop.
> The competition would be carbon neutral pesticide free soybeans, which I'm not sure are readily available? Soybeans also typically use energy intensive nitrogen fertilizers, which I'm not sure this process requires. (It might, not sure.)
No it's not. This is the kind of thinking that so many new founders screw up with.
The competition is what users are willing to buy instead of you. That's regular soy beans, not whatever market you decide it should be. Don't think this way.
I'm thinking like a consumer, specifically me as a consumer. I do not know how many consumers are like me, but I'm always looking for vegan, well rounded, non industrially farmed, pesticide free protein sources. So far, the leading candidate is pea protein, and while I love soybeans and tofu, it's hard to find soy that is ethically sourced. (Not encumbered with awful genetic patents, for instance.)
The only thing I think that matters is the cost. To sell at scale and displace other foods, it is going to have to be as cheap as chicken. There is no point building a large factory that can produce this stuff at quantity at the price of wagu beef, because there is no market for that product. Even to vegans you are competing with tofu. Cost is why Quorn remains a niche product.
To add to this, it appears many scientists/ecologists around Europe are very worried about practical desertification due to monoculture (industrial/chemical growing of one crop across vast areas).
This is so much of a problem that even skeptical industrial farmers are starting to use organic farming techniques (such as compost or nettle manure) to replenish their soils for monoculture. Which is of course not as good as smart permaculture setups, but well.
> * It's a fermentation process, so it takes heat and water, not just air.
To be fair, if the heat is from solar or wind energy, and the water is collected from rain (which I guess includes river water?) then those are also "out of thin air".
Or I suppose you could say that air containing rain is not as thin (i.e. contains more mass) than "normal" air, or that "air" only refers to the gases, not the rain falling through it, in which case they'd have to rely on moisture vaporators, like in Star Wars.
Most vegetation is not made out of vegetables :) Fruits and vegetables tend to have a very high water content, specially the ones we bred for human consumption.
Any random tree will have about 50% water and close to that amount in carbon, with trace amounts of other elements. That's less water than you and me.
It's cellular ag without any need for carbohydrate feedstock - instead using hydrogen. That would make it much friendlier in terms of land use than even traditional plant-based ag. Their corporate website is https://solarfoods.com/ and they say they will start production in 2023.
I need more details than that, but looks very interesting:
“HOW SOLEIN IS MADE
Solein® is made from natural single-cell organisms, which are grown in a fermentation process. Water is split from the air with renewable electricity into hydrogen and oxygen. The cells are fed CO2 from the air, hydrogen and mineral nutrients.
These microorganisms are then able to make amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), and vitamins. They do the heavy lifting in this process. We are only letting their microscopic lives fulfil their purpose: procreation and diversification.
When it's time to harvest the Solein, the excess water is removed, and then it is finally dried into a fine protein powder, with no plants or animals harmed in the process.”
PS: fulfill (sic)
PS2: I'm sure the similarity of the name with soylent green is not lost on the marketing team, I'm just surprised they found it beneficial.
> These microorganisms are then able to make amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), and vitamins.
* Carbohydrates are easy. (It's actually very difficult to "transform" light into sugar, but there are plenty of plants and bacteria that can do that. They are using Hydrogen instead of light, but so let's say it's "easy".)
* Lipids are even easier. (I can't remember any technical problem here.)
* Amino acids are difficult to create out of thin air. You need energy and also a source of Nitrogen. Transforming the Nitrogen of the atmosphere into amino acids is very difficult and only a few specialized microorganism can do that, so color me skeptical. Another possibility is to give feed them with nitrates, that is a very common and important fertilizer for plants. It's necessary a lot of energy to produce nitrates, so it's not an easy step. Perhaps they can hide the nitrates inside the "mineral nutrients" that is technically true, but it's almost cheating.
* Vitamins are probably also difficult. Each vitamin is very different. I doubt they selected one microorganism that can produce all of them, if that really exists. Also you need a lot of some vitamins and very few of other, the amount is also important. So I guess to use this it's necessary to complement it with vitamins from other sources.
The nitrogen source is effectively in the nutrients (so not air/nitrogen fixation by their organism), and is provided as ammonia, according to this video by Solar Foods[0]. I agree this is cheating considering what is needed to produce ammonia from N2.
The only hard part of creating amino acids out of thin air is breaking triple nitrogen bonds down, something we've become quite skilled at via Haber-Bosch.
Other than some sanitation woes in their factory, they produce a decent product. I use it heavily when traveling since it's easy to get some soylent at my destination. No need to prep food or have a kitchen, reasonably balanced, tasty enough.
This may seem like it is totally unrelated to grid stabilization for intermittent renewables (solar, wind, ...) but this type of technology could radically change the need to store and release energy.
microbes, bacteria etc are extremely resilient to temporary adversity, when theres a surplus of intermittent energy you can feed them the energy, when there is insufficient energy you can let the cells wait for their next meal.
this also frees up energy otherwise spent on agriculture
EDIT: if the claim is true that SCProtein is end-to-end 20x more efficient than vegetable protein and 200x more efficient than meat protein (implying vegetable protein to be ~10x as efficient as meat protein) then this implies feeding these SCProtein to cattle would result in classic meat but still 2x as efficient as vegetable protein today!
EDIT2: this would result in the following order of footprints of foodstuffs:
* animal meat fed vegetable protein (for the super rich)
* vegetable protein (for the rich)
* animal meat fed solein(for the middle class)
* solein (for the lower class)
The bulk of the population will see an inversion where its more responsible to eat solein-fed animal meat than it is to eat vegetable protein!! This results from the inability / impracticality to feed protein to plants
Another observation, if its 20 times as efficient as growing vegetable protein, then we could easily afford to slash say half of agricultural land, giving enormous areas for solar panels, with about 1 / 2 + 20 x 1 / 2 = 10.5 x as much protein as today.
Insightful thoughts! Although is the meat production efficiency really dominated by feed production efficiency - otherwise this deduction doesn't hold?
> feeding these SCProtein to cattle would result in classic meat but still 2x as efficient as vegetable protein today!
I'm willing to believe it is good nutrition and low footprint for the environment. But the cultural footprint is too high, just look at this forum!
Our cultural archetypes are rich, see which you would do for a few days and which you would do daily:
* dawn at a mountain cabin overlooking the town below, no running water [vs] dawn at a modern apartment in a block full of buildings.
* food grown in plants, in fields tended by people and fertilized with manure [vs] food grown in a vat.
* A week hiking [vs] a week going to the gym.
* Being socially approved by one day marrying at a church [vs] living with whoever you fancy every day for the rest of your life.
* Eating cabbage [vs] eating protein dust made with genetically modified bacteria that tastes like chocolate dough.
* Eating genetically modified cabbage that tastes like chocolate dough [vs] eating protein dust made with genetically modified bacteria that tastes like cabbage.
Like other commenters I found this marketing website pretty nauseating. The Wikipedia article on "Hydrogen oxidizing bacteria" has better info and mentions how Solar Foods is using knallgas bacteria at the bottom:
Ok, so they're growing some kind of microorganism. But I feel like for years I heard that spirulina would become an important tool for feeding the planet ... but mostly the people that consume it do so in pretty small amounts, and it doesn't seem to be taking over the world.
From a skim, the site doesn't actually say what organism they're growing. Why is it more likely to be impactful than others?
While most vegetation is air and water, the ability to manipulate this into a wide variety of products is pretty incredible.
Leave it to one of humanity's oldest food prep techniques: fermentation. Also, not all fermentation requires heat. It certainly will generate heat as it ferments. Perhaps it can be captured and redistributed into its manufacturing.
The questions for me are what the input costs really are (from energy material sourcing all the way to distribution). I've seen a bunch of critiques of cellular ag from the 'regenerative' spaces (which make good arguments around monocrop farming and impacts on rancher livelihoods (particularly those trying to do more indigenous practices)), and also provocations of inquiry such as:
>Seriously. Solein® is a unique single-cell protein made with a fully natural fermentation process. Using just air and electricity as its primary raw materials, Solein is the most sustainable protein in the world.
so..... instead of "wasting" time in spending water and soil and fertilizer into making plants that use solar energy to create "food", we skip that step and just use electricity that is generated from solar energy and make protein out of it..... law of thermodynamics say matter can neither be created nor destroyed so unless this is reducing inefficiencies of the existing plant model, isnt it 1 unit of electricty=1 unit of protein?
or are they aiming for heatpump style efficiencies? 5:1??
New solar farms use panels that can achieve light-to-electricity efficiency over 20% [1]. Electrolytic splitting of water to produce hydrogen is about 80% efficient [2] for a combined efficiency of ~17%. Growing potatoes -- a calorie dense but not particularly protein rich crop -- converts only about 1.7% of sunlight to edible calories [3].
The intuition behind cultivating hydrogen oxidizing bacteria for single cell protein is that the coupled efficiency of solar photovoltaics plus electrolyzers can be an order of magnitude more productive per hectare for sunlight-to-protein than growing crops in fields. It doesn't require irrigation, weed control, pest control, tilling, or harvesters. It can use land that is too dry, rocky, hot, cold, or contaminated to grow crops. It's still an open question whether the output protein can be of a quality and price that it will out-compete e.g. conventionally grown soybeans, because despite all these advantages it is also much more capital intensive than growing beans.
> can be an order of magnitude more productive per hectare for sunlight-to-protein than growing crops in fields.
But what's the efficiency of converting Hydrogen (and CO2) to carbohydrates? Pulling number out of thin air, I'll be very happy if it's 10% or 20% [1]. So from solar to carbohydrates they get 20%*80%*¿20%?=3% that is the double of potatoes, not an order of magnitude better.
And the conversion to proteins is even harder. They need a microorganism that can fixate Nitrogen from the air (that is very costly for the microorganism) or use a fertilizer like ammonia nitrate (that use a lot of energy in an industria plant).
[1] For an easy, one step organic reaction in the lab, the efficiency is like 60%-70%. It varies a lot, but never expect something like 99%. In the lab, most reactions use a brute force approach like boiling it in acid, instead of using a specialized enzyme. On the other hand, the transformation form H2 and CO2 to carbohydrates has like 10 or 20 steps, and each step has a small lose. I'd be happy with a global 20% efficiency, but perhaps I'm too optimistic.
The authors found a tradeoff between efficiency and growth rates. The highest efficiency came with the slowest growth rate. But they concluded that 50% efficiency was achievable at practical growth rates. Keep in mind also that potatoes only contain about 10% protein by dry weight while the bacteria cultivated to make single cell protein can contain 50% protein by dry weight. Soybeans are about 40% protein.
I think the cool part of using solar panels to have an electrified process is that you can use non-farmland (Bill Gates is buying it all :), could use less water, also produces electricity.
In the perfect future, we are all sucking on tubes of atmospheric liquid cheese product. From pipe to pipe.
> combined efficiency of ~17%. Growing potatoes -- a calorie dense but not particularly protein rich crop -- converts only about 1.7%
Efficiency of light is not that important, because plants reach their maximum rate of photosynthesis at fairly low light levels. In reality yield is limited by low temperatures in winter, avaliability of water, etc.
The process being proposed here requires much more investment of capital and resources than simply planting potato in the fields -> now we need solar panels, electrolysis, etc.
But if you want to improve yield by throwing money at the problem, you build a greenhouse, invest in hydroponics, etc. and your yield will grow several times.
So that would be a better point of comparison -> for a dollar or physical resources invested, does this approach give you more extra yield than a state of the art greenhouse would?
‘Sustainable’ in the food context is much more around total resource use (land, water, materials), waste products (ghgs and waste water) rather than a primary focus of energy efficiency.
Besides - heatpumps are largely the exception in thermodynamics, expecting anything more than 100% efficiency for most non-heat moving applications should not be expected.
I’d guess it is because either photosynthesis isn’t actually that efficient, and/or a lot of the energy goes into growing structural elements of the plant.
The amino acid and lipid profiles of any single plant species are not sufficient to meet the full spectrum of human nutritional needs, so if they can do that with a single organism, it's a win. Also, most of the dry plant matter consists of cellulose that humans can't digest, so eliminating that is maybe a win? I don't know, because much of it can still be used as dietary fiber to nourish our gut microbiome, even though we can't use it for energy. I guess another factor is plants may only sprout whatever part of it we can eat seasonally, that is, seeds, roots, fruits, whatever it is may not be a permanent feature of every lifecycle stage.
I've been following this company for a few years now. It is not fake, just bad advertisement I guess. My biochemistry professor (and as far as my textbook understanding of biochemistry goes), the process which they use to produce the protein makes sense.
Wether it's something economically sustainable, or something that might become "socially accepted" or something, I don't know.
If I have to be picky, I'd rather eat a synthetic protein made with genetically modified bacteria than genetically modified cockroaches powder. You wouldn't probably notice a big difference anyway.
Has anyone been able to locate the actual nutritional information in a serving size of this stuff? Actual carb, protein, and fat calorie counts, sugars, significant vitamins, etc?
Newsflash: all plant-based proteins are made out of thin air. In fact, all proteins are made out of thin air, since animal proteins are made from plants, which are made from air.
>Sorry, plants.
> Conventional food production wastes resources like water, chemicals, animal feed at unsustainable and unreasonable levels.
Animal feed to grow plant-based protein?
> Unlike conventional protein production, it takes just a fraction of all these resources if any, to produce the same nutritional amount of Solein. Even photosynthesis, the way plants convert energy into food, is not as efficient as our method.
So... they use magical electricity that comes out of nowhere, and operates more efficiently that just letting a plant sit there and use the sun.
Amazing how these people blatantly lie and present half-facts so shamelessly.
Conversion efficiency from solar radiation to dry matter is estimated for soy beans at 2.1%.
Solar Foods claims 10 times more energy-efficient per hectare than photosynthesis with soy production.
If you assume 22% efficient solar panels and a longer growing season, because solar panels are less temperature and water dependent than plants, this might just work out.
Actually according to that article it’s perfectly safe to drink in moderate quantities, as long as it doesn’t make up a large portion of your
Total intake over an extended period. It isn’t radioactive
In what way does this sound dystopian? Ideally this is a protein source without the nasty externalities of intensive agriculture and it can exist in places and spaces that aren't typically conducive to food production.
Ideally, yes, plant based diets would dominate, but the idea of turning renewable energy into supplemental foodstuff sounds like a huge win to me.
If it's a more sustainable, cruelty-free source of protein than is currently available, and if it's safe, why not? There are multiple big "if" statements there, but should they all pass, I'd be all for it.
By using the term cruelty-free, are you describing dense, commercial feedlot animal production only, or are you including all types of animal husbandry and meat acquisition, including hunting?
There's a definite spectrum of cruelty, with factory farming near one extreme and many forms of hunting near the other. How much cruelty one can stomach (literally, in this case) is up to the individual, of course.
And yet animals (even herbivores) kill other animals all the time. This concern over the cruelty of killing livestock for food is such a weird human conceit.
I understand it's fake (what is the carbon source? it is stated to be CO_2 neutral) but I guess I don't understand the point or punchline.
edit: as pointed out below and elsewhere, the carbon source is CO2, and I misinterpreted the way CO2 neutral is used here, my bad. However there are serious questions to ask about how they are representing and overselling their process. It is a complete misrepresentation to present this as protein synthesis out of air (in fact, the nitrogen source is ammonia [0], NOT nitrogen fixation).
Yes, I read a bit on this (apparently real after all) business and I saw CO2 is the carbon source. It just confused me the promotional website does not even mention CO2. When they called Solein carbon neutral, I assumed they are talking about the product and process, not the entire cycle (in the same way you might call planting trees CO2-emission negative), though this makes sense. In any case, I still find it to be a pretty strong misrepresentation to call this protein synthesis out of "thin air".
Planting a tree is carbon neutral if you do nothing to sequester the carbon. It's negative in the short term, but neutral over the life of the tree (more or less).
Trees live long enough that that "short term" can still be 100s of years, and buying ourselves 100 years is probably the best we can hope for anyway at this point. And trees are capable of automatically spawning new trees, so a self-sustaining growing tree population should surely count as carbon negative...
As someone who manages hundreds of acres of forest - most trees won't live that long because we'll harvest them or they'll die to disease and wildfire.
Reforesting an area would be carbon negative, and eventually the first will saturate. It's much much more carbon negative to produce biochar, biotar, or mass timber buildings.
The amount of carbon in the atmosphere, that used to be underground in coal, oil, and gas.
More than 170 gigatons. (approximately, this is just the 40% higher concentration than historical high point, based on 412 ppm co2 in atmosphere vs 300 ppm historical high point, back of the envelope).
This seems like a lot of land, a lot of trees, and would have to include harvesting and storing the trees after 100 years.
Well I wasn't proposing we could solve climate change just planting trees (though I've seen that exact proposition made before).
Genetically engineered trees that have a much faster CO2 processing time perhaps...
There is no nitrogen mentioned in this explanation. You cannot make amino acids or proteins without nitrogen. These organism either have to be able to do nitrogen-fixation from the air, which is a really difficult and energy-intensive process or the nitrogen has to come from some growth medium. It certainly doesn't make a good first impression that they "forgot" such an important part in this description.
In general the interesting part of such a scheme is how much energy it uses. Converting CO2 to organic molecules and nitrogen-fixation are very energy-intensive processes, the problem isn't that we can't do this but that the amount of energy is incredibly expensive compared to using photosynthesis in plants.