A syndicate of the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation Topsoe and other organizations and companies are researching ways to make protein from CO2. The research recently got renewed for 2025-2027, providing up to DKK 162.2 million (€21.1 million) for the next phase.
In a world grappling with climate change, resource scarcity, and rising food insecurity, the idea of producing food out of thin air may sound like science fiction but for Danish technology company Topsoe, it’s becoming a scientific reality.
Through a groundbreaking consortium backed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Topsoe is pioneering a process that combines Power-to-X technology with biological solutions to create proteins from carbon dioxide, water, and air. This innovation could revolutionize how the world thinks about sustainable food production especially in regions where arable land is scarce or traditional agriculture is no longer viable.
In this exclusive interview, Poul Georg Moses, Chief Technology Officer at Topsoe, sits down to discuss the vision, science, and future of this transformative project — from the chemistry behind converting CO2 into edible proteins, to the challenges of scaling, cost parity, and making sure the end product doesn’t just nourish people, but also delights them.
Find the entire conversation below.
1. To start off, could you tell us Topsoe’s role in this consortium?
Yes. So in this consortium, we deliver the Power-to-X solutions that essentially provide the building blocks going into the substrate for the bio solutions.
What the consortium is aiming to do is essentially convert air and water into food — specifically, water, CO2, and nitrogen into proteins. We do that by combining Power-to-X technologies with bio solutions.
Our role at Topsoe is to use the Power-to-X solutions to take air and water and make ammonia, methanol, and carbon monoxide, which are then used to make acetate. That acetate is then fed into the bio solutions.
There’s also an integration aspect — you integrate the CO2 loop so that you’re not emitting CO2; instead, you’re using it to make the proteins that are then upgraded into food.
2. Your partners include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. What are their roles in this consortium?
Both are major global funds. The Gates Foundation focuses on ensuring livelihoods in underdeveloped areas — that’s where the vision of addressing malnutrition comes from.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation shares that vision. They were very visionary — when we started phase one, it wasn’t even clear if we could make proteins from air.
They helped set ambitious goals, brought partners together, and enabled us to deliver on those stretch targets.
3. Why did you choose carbon dioxide specifically for your technology?
The vision of the project is to provide a food source that doesn’t depend on arable land — in a sustainable way.
You do need carbon atoms in your food, and therefore, we chose to go with CO2 because you can get it from various waste streams. For instance, CO2 from mineral sources — like cement production — is a byproduct that can be captured and converted into protein.
It could also come from biogas production, or even breweries. When you make beer, you produce CO2, which could then be upgraded into food.
4. There are a lot of carbon dioxide capture units being developed with the rise of AI and data centers. Is that captured CO2 useful for you?
Yes. Essentially, we can use any CO2 source. Part of what we’re good at in Topsoe is taking the CO2 source and ensuring it can go into our processes. We can essentially take any CO2 source.
5. How will you make sure that this food meets all nutritional values?
In the first phase, the main goal was just to prove technical feasibility. We weren’t certain that we could actually do it when we started.
Now we know technically that we can make proteins — and of course, a protein is not food.
So we’ve expanded the consortium with partners that have expertise in ensuring food is delicious. One of the partners is a Danish company called “Spora”, a research institute for food that’s born out of the innovative Copenhagen food scene.
In this second phase, we’re ensuring that we find innovative ways to produce delicious food that people will actually eat and enjoy — because otherwise, it won’t change anything.
6. So what form will this food take - can we expect hamburgers?
If that’s what you like! Another target of the project is to enable a protein source for geographies where protein is scarce and arable land is limited.
Having livestock there would be very challenging. The food should feel natural to whoever lives in that geography — that could be hamburgers, or it could be something completely different.
7. In the market, there are already multiple types of synthetic meat or synthetic food available. How is your technology different from theirs?
What we do differently is this combination of Power-to-X and bio solutions. These are quite different worlds — we come from the legacy petrochemical industry, which doesn’t overlap much with enzyme or pharma production.
But we’re bringing these two worlds together so each can do what it does best — that’s the innovation here. Many other approaches stay only within the bio solutions sphere, and we believe there’s a benefit in combining the two.
8. When it comes to food taste and texture are the top priorities. If it’s made artificially, how do you make sure it looks, feels, and tastes like food?
Our experience of what makes great food also depends on culture. We live in a global economy, so we mix and match preferences.
What we’ll try to do here is create prototype foods that fit different kinds of preferences. We won’t be limited to mimicking traditional foods.
One thing is to replicate something produced through traditional agriculture — but we can also make something entirely new that provides a delicious experience without mimicking existing foods.
9. So we’ll be tasting a very different kind of food — do you mean to say that?
Yes. We’ll do both — some foods that are familiar, and others that explore new ideas. There’s a whole workstream in the project around this.
Knowing the innovative background of our partners, they won’t be limited by traditional definitions of food. What I imagine as a great food experience might be very different from what you imagine as one.
10. How does cost parity fit into this? How would you define that?
There’s still quite a way to go before reaching cost parity. One workstream in the second phase looks at different ways of combining technology components and plant sizes, depending on the CO2 source.
The next phase aims for industrial pilot or demonstration plants to show this integration. The protein and food coming from that will surely not be cost-competitive yet — you need standardization before driving costs down.
So, price parity won’t appear until after full-scale demonstration.
Even small quantities of essential amino acids can significantly improve health in regions facing malnutrition. Producing these proteins locally can reduce dependency on global food supply chains.
Producing protein via livestock is very taxing on the environment and planetary boundaries.
We’d like to produce part of the world’s protein needs sustainably — without using more arable land. And since livestock-based protein costs are rising (especially in Europe), the price point we’re targeting is not today’s, but a future one.
11. What’s the timeline like? When should we expect your food to hit the shelves?
Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a bit. The timeline we’re working on is to have an industrial pilot or demo plant producing this before the end of the decade.
That won’t fill supermarket shelves yet — unless it’s a highly specialized one!
We need to validate that the technology works reliably and that the technical risks are gone. Once validated, scaling up to multiple plants will make the food commercially available.
Initially, it’s more likely to appear as an ingredient in other food products rather than a standalone item. That’s what we’re exploring in the next phase.
12. What’s next — what does the next phase of this journey look like for Topsoe?
The key goal is to have prototype food that incorporates this protein source — something delicious that people would actually want to eat.
If we can’t deliver that, even people in need won’t eat it if it feels or tastes wrong.
There are also industrial deliverables — ensuring we have the right setup for large-scale demonstration, further validating and reducing technical risk.
