Creating food from thin air: ChemBE professors take on the future of nutrition

For a team of Johns Hopkins researchers, the challenge of feeding people during times of crisis or conflict is an opportunity to dramatically reinvent how food is made: out of almost nothing.

“Yes, we are aiming to create food from thin air,” said Collin Timm, a chemical and biological engineer at APL. “It would be a revolutionary capability to be able to produce food on demand in any setting.”

Timm is the principal investigator for one of four teams selected for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Cornucopia program. He leads the APL research team in attempting to unlock the potential to produce nutritionally complete, palatable foods in the field. The group is using electricity to capture water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and trace minerals from the air to produce a rich, glucose-based material called feedstock, which can then be used as a platform for producing microbial food products.

Chao Wang and Michael Tsapatsis, two faculty members at the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and its Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, are working with the APL team to help develop these upstream complex processes. Wang, an associate professor, and Tsapatsis, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, have experience creating useful products from atmospheric carbon.

“I am working on using electrochemical methods to capture CO2 from air,” said Wang, “and Michael is working on catalytic conversion of C1 intermediates (molecules or chemicals that contain one carbon atom) into sugar.”

APL’s approach, dubbed RePLICaTE—for Reducing Provisions and Logistics Inputs through Calorie Transformation from Electricity—is focused on delivering a working prototype, demonstrating a leap forward in food production on demand. Collaborators on the project include North Carolina State University and Meridian Biotech.

This story was adapted from an APL story