Life Cycle Assessments and Techno-Economic Analyses

The RVC team has been working to understand Techno Economic Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment to understand what it will take to truly make this technology and method sustainable.

Life Cycle Assessment or LCA (also known as life cycle analysis) is a methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the life cycle of a commercial product, process, or service. For instance, in the case of a manufactured product, environmental impacts are assessed from raw material extraction and processing (cradle), through the product's manufacture, distribution and use, to the recycling or final disposal of the materials composing it (grave).[1][2] An LCA study involves a thorough inventory of the energy and materials that are required across the industry value chain of the product, process or service, and calculates the corresponding emissions to the environment.[2] LCA thus assesses cumulative potential environmental impacts. The aim is to document and improve the overall environmental profile of the product.

Techno Economic Analysis (abbreviated TEA) is a method of analyzing the economic performance of an industrial process, product, or service. It typically uses software modeling to estimate capital cost, operating cost, and revenue based on technical and financial input parameters.

Published papers and media stories

Lab-grown Meat

Anticipatory Life Cycle Analysis of In Vitro Biomass Cultivation for Cultured Meat Production in the United States (2015) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01614 Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat: Techno-Economic Analysis and Due Diligence (2020) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848 - more robust TEA analysis by David Humbird, sponsored by Open Philanthropy Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. (2021) https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ Techno-Economic Analysis of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (2021) https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/ - TEA sponsored by GFI. What are barriers to lower production cost from $10K/lb to $2.5/lb Ex‑ante life cycle assessment of commercial‑scale cultivated meat production in 2030 (2021) https://cedelft.eu/publications/rapport-lca-of-cultivated-meat-future-projections-for-different-scenarios/ Anticipatory life cycle assessment and techno-economic assessment of commercial cultivated meat production (2021) https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA-TEA-policy.pdf - GFI’s own in-depth analysis of the TEA they commisioned Review of Techno-Economic Assessment of Cultivated Meat (2021) https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-review-of-the-cost-of-manufacturing - Paul Wood’s critical analysis of GFI’s TEA Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef (2022) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2372229-lab-grown-meat-could-be-25-times-worse-for-the-climate-than-beef/ https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-meat-25-times-co2 (with video) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (2022) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1.full.pdf

Lab-grown Dairy

Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Offset Potential for Cultured Milk Protein https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Life-Cycle-Assessment-and-Carbon-Offset-Potential-for-Cultured-Milk-Protein.pdf Life Cycle Assessment of Perfect Day Protein https://resources.perfectday.com/articles/lca-executive-summary https://perfectday.com/blog/life-cycle-assessment-of-perfect-day-protein/ Steer, M. 2015. A Comparison of Land, Water and Energy Use Between Conventional and Yeast-Derived Dairy Products: An Initial Analysis. Report prepared for Perfect Day. University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. see https://web.archive.org/web/20170126172124/http://www.animalfreemilk.com/files/PD-LCA.pdf

Other

Economic feasibility and environmental impact of synthetic spider silk production from escherichia coli https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871678417301644 “Highlights Demonstration of scalable production of artificial spider silk proteins. E. coli techno-economic results for protein production range from $23–$761 kg−1. E. coli life cycle results for protein production range from 55 to 572 kg CO2-eq. kg−1. Process optimization highlight areas for targeted research & development. The techno-economic analysis indicates a minimum sale price from pioneer and optimized E. coli plants of $761/kg and $23/kg with greenhouse gas emissions of 572 kg CO2-eq./kg and 55 kg CO2-eq./kg, respectively.” global warming potential (GWP) in terms of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The GWP metric for this study combines three emissions, namely CO2, CH4, and N2O as a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) “Pioneer plant” uses IPTG for expression, and Ni columns for purification - those turn out the main cost drivers. Case 2 optimizes those production steps, resulting in 97% reduction in sale price from Case 1 Does this study include biogenic CO2? Not clear...

Critical Analysis of the Commercial Potential of Plants for the Production of Recombinant Proteins https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2019.00720/full Techno-economic analysis of the industrial production of a low-cost enzyme using E. coli: the case of recombinant β-glucosidase https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5875018/ Process Simulation and Techno-Economic Analysis of Large-Scale Bioproduction of Sweet Protein Thaumatin II https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/4/838/htm

Meeting notes on these topics

Science Meeting June 12, 2023

Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef https://www.newscientist.com/article/2372229-lab-grown-meat-could-be-25-times-worse-for-the-climate-than-beef/ https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-meat-25-times-co2 (with video) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1.full.pdf Look at authors to see if they are the same as previous analysis

The Truth About Lab-Grown Meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmanbWwMa5w

Science Meeting November 29, 2021

Maria digging into TEA some more? Perhaps looking into how CO2 production is handled in the lab-grown meat TEA’s. Can also look up data on CO2 production during Trichoderma fermentation This may be a good reference for CO2 generation by Trichoderma during protein production:l Carbon mass balance evaluation of cellulase production on soluble and insoluble substrates https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12467477/ Could also look into the assumption in the Perfect Day TEA that biomass waste is either equally valuable as the dairy protein, or a complete waste - how does the lab meat TEA deal with that? Is there a middle ground?

Here are some more Techno-Economic / Life Cycle analyses to look into: Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Offset Potential for Cultured Milk Protein https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Life-Cycle-Assessment-and-Carbon-Offset-Potential-for-Cultured-Milk-Protein.pdf Economic feasibility and environmental impact of synthetic spider silk production from escherichia coli https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871678417301644 Critical Analysis of the Commercial Potential of Plants for the Production of Recombinant Proteins https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2019.00720/full Techno-economic analysis of the industrial production of a low-cost enzyme using E. coli: the case of recombinant β-glucosidase https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5875018/ Process Simulation and Techno-Economic Analysis of Large-Scale Bioproduction of Sweet Protein Thaumatin II https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/4/838/htm

“Techno economic analysis (TEA) evaluates the technical performance and economic feasibility of a technology. Life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with a product system throughout its life cycle from raw material extraction to disposal.” (link) “Techno–economic analysis (TEA) could help to assess the potential economic feasibilities, bottlenecks, operation targets for process improvement and identify further research and development effort requirements during early stages of different biobased technologies. On the other hand, life cycle assessment (LCA) could help assess the potential environmental impacts, identify environmental hotspots and help improve the overall bioenergy product or systems life cycle for reduced environmental impacts.” (link)

Maria is covering this paper: Economic feasibility and environmental impact of synthetic spider silk production from escherichia coli https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871678417301644 “Highlights Demonstration of scalable production of artificial spider silk proteins. E. coli techno-economic results for protein production range from $23–$761 kg−1. E. coli life cycle results for protein production range from 55 to 572 kg CO2-eq. kg−1. Process optimization highlight areas for targeted research & development. The techno-economic analysis indicates a minimum sale price from pioneer and optimized E. coli plants of $761/kg and $23/kg with greenhouse gas emissions of 572 kg CO2-eq./kg and 55 kg CO2-eq./kg, respectively.” global warming potential (GWP) in terms of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The GWP metric for this study combines three emissions, namely CO2, CH4, and N2O as a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) “Pioneer plant” uses IPTG for expression, and Ni columns for purification - those turn out the main cost drivers. Case 2 optimizes those production steps, resulting in 97% reduction in sale price from Case 1 Does this study include biogenic CO2? Not clear...

Science Meeting October 4, 2021

Maria will be presenting some articles on Techno-Economic Analyses for lab grown meat: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. (2021) https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ References the following papers: Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat: Techno-Economic Analysis and Due Diligence (2020) https://engrxiv.org/795su - more robust TEA analysis by David Humbird, sponsored by Open Philanthropy Techno-Economic Analysis of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (2021) https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/ - TEA sponsored by GFI. What are barriers to lower production cost from $10K/lb to $2.5/lb Anticipatory life cycle assessment and techno-economic assessment of commercial cultivated meat production https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA-TEA-policy.pdf - GFI’s own in-depth analysis of the TEA they commisioned Review of Techno-Economic Assessment of Cultivated Meat (2021) https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-review-of-the-cost-of-manufacturing - Paul Wood’s critical analysis of GFI’s TEA GFI’s proposed facility would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, >10% of domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives. But only one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. Cost $450 million. Would need 4000 of these facilities to cover 1/10 of meat supply - would need to build one per day by 2030. Humbird’s previous TEA for OpenPhil found that using large, 20,000 L reactors would result in a production cost of about $17 per pound of meat; becomes $40 at the grocery store—or a $100 quarter-pounder at a restaurant. GFI assumed food-grade facilities; Humbird assumed pharma grade - needed for mammalian cell culture. Is it possible to grow engineered soy with the ideal amino acid profile? “It could take years of research and development to devise a method of processing soy into forms suitable for cell culture, on a scale large enough to supply the cultured meat industry.” - seems like this is something that should be funded! Is there a recording or transcript of the contentious GFI invite-only video call on June 29? Growth media for yeast often includes yeast extract - can we recycle the excess yeast biomass when we use it to produce cheese protein? Can yeast strains be optimized for food production?

Do any of these TEA analyses include a spreadsheet with a model that we could adapt?

Admin Meeting September 27, 2021

Former RVC member made a bunch of animated youtube videos for his current company Sugarlogix: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDFhu24Z7p6-jW5XEMGDJw Kyle may be willing to help make some animations for RVC as well Angelo also mentioned he knows someone who could help with any animation needs

Angelo is part of a good facebook group where people exchange working recipes and tips: https://www.facebook.com/groups/vegancheeze

Next week Science topic: econometric analysis of cultured meat vs cattle industry Climate Impacts of Cultured Meat and Beef Cattle (2019) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. (2021)

https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ 

Techno-Economic Analysis of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (2021) https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/ LCA of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (2021) https://cedelft.eu/publications/rapport-lca-of-cultivated-meat-future-projections-for-different-scenarios/ Anticipatory life cycle assessment and techno-economic assessment of commercial cultivated meat production (2021) https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA-TEA-policy.pdf Review of Techno-Economic Assessment of Cultivated Meat (2021) https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-review-of-the-cost-of-manufacturing Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat: Techno-Economic Analysis and Due Diligence (2020) https://engrxiv.org/795su

Science meeting April 18th, 2022

Life Cycle Assessments of the dairy industry Dairy Farms and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): The Allocation Criterion Useful to Estimate Undesirable Products https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LJsRSSlcnHeTKO408cKwB7NkADgWLtT3/view?usp=sharing “The software SimaPro 8.01 PhD, Pré Consultants 2015 was employed to estimate the environmental impacts. The ReCiPe Midpoint (H) method was adopted, considering the 100-year perspective for the environmental mechanism of the midpoint impact category for climate change/global warming potential (CC/GWP) and terrestrial acidification (TA).”

Science Meeting Dec 13, 2021

Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Offset Potential for Cultured Milk Protein https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Life-Cycle-Assessment-and-Carbon-Offset-Potential-for-Cultured-Milk-Protein.pdf How do these numbers compare to Perfect Day? Global Warming Potential: 2.71 kg CO2 equiv / kg protein, vs 18-79 for bovine milk Energy demand: 56.3 MJ/kg vs 79.2-140 for bovine milk Blue Water Consumption: 74 L/kg vs 1970-5800 for bovine milk Uses OpenLCA v1.9, using the ecoinvent 3.6 database and ReCiPe 2016 Model scenarios with varying parameters (source of sugar, energy source, baseline input amounts used) Global Warming Potential Best scenario (Nuclear Power and Beet Sugar, low-end baseline inputs): 0.89 kg CO2eq Worst scenario (Indian coal, high-end baseline inputs): 146.5 kg CO2eq The PerfectDay estimate of 2.71 kg CO2 seems very optimistic! Blue Water Consumption Best scenario: 2.05 m3/kg or 2050 L/kg Worst scenario : 313.57 m3/kg or 313,5700 L/kg Why are these values so much higher than Perfect day? P.7: “the LCA of Italian lager beer informed the quantities of water that are needed”

Sustainability analyses

Study	GWP (kg CO2 eq)	Energy Demand (MJ)	Water Consumption (L)	Land Use (m2 yr crop eq)
Perfect Day	2.71	56.3	74	See facility size?
Perfect Day 2	11.8	219	307
Bhandari et al.	0.89 - 146.50 Median 22.39		2,050 - 313,570 Median 6,960	0.01 - 50.94 Median 0.46
Dairy industry	30.9 - 84.85 Median 68.18	79.1 - 140 Median 109.55	1970 - 5620 Median 3795	Look up

Land use m²a / kg is area in m² divided by kg/yr

Steer, M. 2015. A Comparison of Land, Water and Energy Use Between Conventional and Yeast-Derived Dairy Products: An Initial Analysis. Report prepared for Perfect Day. University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. see https://web.archive.org/web/20170126172124/http://www.animalfreemilk.com/files/PD-LCA.pdf

An attributional life cycle assessment of microbial protein production: A case study on using hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721008317

Admin Meeting Dec 6, 2021

Next Science topic More Life Cycle Analysis? CO2 generation by Trichoderma - see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12467477/ Co-product allocation for waste Trichoderma biomass (similar to waste E. coli or yeast biomass?)

Science Meeting November 1, 2021

Life Cycle Assessment of Perfect Day Protein https://resources.perfectday.com/articles/lca-executive-summary (37 pp)

Executive summary

Comparison with protein in milk, functional unit is measure of nutritional aspect 1kg of protein vs 1 kg of protein in milk Study conformed to ISO 14040, 14044 - required independent 3-person panel Environmental Impact Report; biogenic carbon dioxide emissions were excluded as they are “part of the carbon cycle” rather than “releas[ing] locked up carbon into the atmosphere” like fossil fuels Odd because the dairy industry includes manure, stomach gasses, etc. (Point to look at: amount of CO2 released during fermentation of Trichoderma reesei) Three Metrics Greenhouse Gas Emissions

• • • we should look at how much CO2 trichoderma uses

Blue Water Consumption - liters of water withdrawn from the ground and not returned to the surface/ground water sources Energy Use Defining system boundary of analysis, “cradle to gate” (once it leaves Perfect day as a product) Materials Manufacturing Inputs: Raw materials, including corn Not from purchased glucose Transportation Protein Production / Development Actual fermentation Inputs: Sugar from corn starch hydrolysis Nitrogen, minerals, vitamins, O2 gas Outputs: Whey protein Biomass by product Dairy industry has additional products generated--leather, meat How do you attribute the impacts/costs of each product Perfect Day also has additional products generated--solid biomass co-product used in a variety of situations Use about x3 more biomass products than their target product Ran parallel analysis where they considered all biomass products as waste What can the offproduct be used for? Special GMO handling? Reactor backfeeding? Bi-product accumulation Perfect Day whey is between 91-96% lower in GHG emissions than that of total proteins in milk by their calculations. Energy demand for their whey is 28.9% (study 2) and 59.7% (study 4) lower than that of total protein in milk. Different independent studies of different markets Substantially lower Blue Water Consumption as well (96% (study 1) to 98% (study 3) reduction) Claimed 73.9 L/kg whey protein produced (13.5 g/L?) Claim lower number if subtract cleaning, etc. Sensitivity Analysis (where assumed biomass was just waste) GHG emissions reductions between 62 and 85% Energy demands 67-177% higher than milk under this assumption Still 84-94% reduction in BWC Do not include GHG of biomass under earlier assumptions! Do not include power use of drying biomass If US Consumers entirely switched to Perfect Day as protein source from milk -246 tons CO2 Emissions Equivalent to 28 million homes’ energy or 53 million passenger vehicles for 1 year Reduction of 18,600 billion gallons of water Reduction of 75 billion MJ energy use ~20 million MWH Production Process Facility Flowchart Fermenter Area Three, 40,000-gallon silos Generally when you do one of these massive fermenter runs, you gradually build up to scale in ramp-up fermenters Glucose Treatment Area Glucose from corn Harvest Silo Cell Separation Area Removal of all biomass products from fermentation broth Strained, then filtered Broth diluted with process water and PH is adjusted To cause proteins to fall out of solution? Is what you would do to drop out casein “Polishing, concentrating, and drying” -> at this point target protein is mostly isolated Final product is spray dried Driers Co-product Drier Whey Drier Biomass byproduct is 78.3% of total mass produced Value of this product is still unknown Whey is 21.7% of the dry mass Final product has moisture < 4% Protein content of powder is 90% NOT saying whey protein is 90% What is rest? Filler Bound Lipids Generally Safe impurities

• • • “Input and output amounts for [protein production/cleaning process/everything] are provided in a confidential appendix”

Study 6, carried out by Food and Agriculture of the United Nations Study included Application of manure and fertilizers to crops Deposition of manure Changes in carbon stocks Enteric Fermentation by ruminants The kinds of things not included in the PD Study Global Warming Potential (from LCIA) Most protein production emissions due to production of glucose by starch hydrolysis (83% of protein development) Cleaning is almost as impactful as protein development (0.552 vs 0.670) Using bleach which contributes to 59% of the emissions Utilities is the highest by far, 1.08 Within Separation and Purification Calcium acetate is 61% of emission Carboxymethyl cellulose is 19% 2.71 final number

FDA filing for Perfect Day: https://www.fda.gov/media/136754/download

Anticipatory Life Cycle Analysis of In Vitro Biomass Cultivation for Cultured Meat Production in the United States https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01614

Do the kind of research that New Harvest has sponsored, on environmental impacts of cultured meat. Latest life cycle assessment

KFC is working with a Russian 3D bioprinting firm to try to make lab-produced chicken nuggets https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/18/21329453/kfc-russia-bioprinting-lab-chicken-nuggets-sustainablehttps://global.kfc.com/press-release/meat-of-the-future-kfc-and-3d-bioprinting-solutions-to-use-a-bioprinter-to-produce-kfc-nuggets “according to a study by the American Environmental Science & Technology Journal, the technology of growing meat from cells has minimal negative impact on the environment, allowing energy consumption to be cut by more than half, greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced 25 fold and 100 times less land to be used than traditional farm-based meat production.” New Harvest has a good overview of the research on environmental impacts of cultured meat.Even the earliest, weakest estimates never claimed to be able to cut energy use compared to poultry. Latest life cycle assessment shows energy use ~4x higher and global warming potential ~3x higher compared to poultry farming,