The article says you need 40 000 of these to replace our meat consumption:
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
You know what the total value of the entire worlds meat industry is today? Less than a trillion. So if we could run those labs for free, it would only take a bit over 80 000 years to for them to pay off. But of course they can't run for that long and they need manpower etc. Now if we mass produce those labs it might become cheaper, but will it really get ten thousand times cheaper?
Now, you could say that costs go down with scale. But we also know that projected costs of large projects rarely stay that low, likely those facilities would cost way more than that at first. And price would have to go down really quickly, as just building the first 10 would cost the equivalent of 20 year of meat production.
Correcting my comment here, the article apparently have a huge error: The 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility.. The article says this:
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
However, the link it is refering says this:
> According to CE Delft's techno-economic analysis, each factory could cost around $450m. A quick calculation suggests 4000 factories at this price would cost an eye-watering $1.8trn.
So the 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility. At that cost the investment to replace the worlds meat production would be worth 20 years of traditional meat farming, and then running cost above that. Significant but not unsurmountable as the article wanted to claim.
Your proposal only works if the production equipment will have a greater than 20-year life. All available evidence says it wont, so the ROI is not 20 years, but practically infinite — and hence insurmountable.
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
You know what the total value of the entire worlds meat industry is today? Less than a trillion. So if we could run those labs for free, it would only take a bit over 80 000 years to for them to pay off. But of course they can't run for that long and they need manpower etc. Now if we mass produce those labs it might become cheaper, but will it really get ten thousand times cheaper?
Now, you could say that costs go down with scale. But we also know that projected costs of large projects rarely stay that low, likely those facilities would cost way more than that at first. And price would have to go down really quickly, as just building the first 10 would cost the equivalent of 20 year of meat production.