I'm not sure we are seeing disruption happening that quickly.bjn wrote: ↑Fri Apr 16, 2021 7:28 pmOne of thing they emphasise is that a disruption can happen very quickly, and it's generally been about a decade or so for most industries once e^x growth kicks in. Nothing much happens for ages as the tech stacks get sorted and early adopters buy in, then everything happens all at once when the exponential growth kicks in and people start throwing hundreds of billions at the new industry. Which is exactly what we are seeing now with BEVS and renewables. They reckon that precision fermentation is really going to start taking off in the early/mid 20s when costs start converging on costs of animal protein, with cell culture based meat no long after.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:45 pmProbably a good thing overall. People probably won’t notice the difference in most processed foods.
I suspect that 2035 maybe a bit optimistic for a collapse in the livestock industries. That’s only 14 years away and replacement of the livestock industry with precision fermentation would take an enormous investment in production and distribution infrastructure.They've applied the same analysis to the raising of livestock and think that by 2035 that the market for livestock of all forms will have massively collapsed, being replaced by range of low cost high tech man-made equivalents to beef and dairy.
However, they acknowledge there is uncertainty in the speed of scaling up....
The paper wrote:The speed of scale-up is one of the biggest unknowns as most of the companies in this sector are startups. The scale-up speed will depend on capital investment, and the ability to repurpose and capture current infrastructure and talent (such as from bioethanol or beer producers). As with most technologies, the cost of marginal production depends largely on the cumulative experience the industry has with producing the relevant technology. This relationship is expressed as the ‘experience curve’. Essentially, every doubling in the cumulative number of units of a given technology reduces the cost of producing one additional unit by a given percentage.
The scale-up of technologies will, therefore, help drive costs lower. Currently, large-scale PF means production on the scale of grams to a few kilograms. This disruption will ultimately require millions of tons of production. Some of the biggest fermentation tanks used today are bigger than 100,000 liters, but those used for PF are in the region of 5,000 liters (the largest are for enzymes). This production is optimized for the current biological standards. However, we expect further improvements in these processes as the technologies improve. For example, Stämm have developed a high throughput continuous process that has improved productivity by 74 times.
If we take BEV's, the technology has been developed for over a century. The Tesla Roadster started being produced in 2008. For BEVs, the 2020 EU market share for new registrations has grown to 5.3% of passenger cars and 2% of light commercial vehicles. As far as I can tell the BEV market share is no better in the US.
Certainly, year on year growth has been impressive. But BEV's are still a small proportion of the market about 14 years after the launch of the first lithium ion using production car. This projection by Deliotte has European BEV market share at about 45% in 2030.
Similarly for renewables, their share of the EU 28 energy market has gone from 8.6% in 2004 to 18.9% in 2019. There has also been a fairly steady year on year increase. The EU's target is for renewables to account for 30% by 2030. So we are still looking at change occurring over decades.