Comment Land usage (Score 1) 209
You would have to build millions upon millions of olympic-sized swimming pools (vats) combined with millions upon millions of acres of supporting infrastructure....
...What.
Do you know what the capacity of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is? Assuming similar output ratio to a 250kL bioreactor (may not be realistic, there's certainly potential issues with oxygenation and other factors), that's about 30 million pounds of meat each year. You might need as many as 3000 of those to produce every pound of beef estimated to be eaten in the U.S. each year. That many bioreactor facilities would displace around 30-40 average size ranches (~15000 acres).
I'll give you that it would require a lot of supporting infrastructure to supply the biofuel, not to mention significant utilities infrastructure, road improvements, etc. This would absolutely cost a staggering amount. Would it ultimately take millions of additional acres to support this level of production? Maybe, but ranches for grazing cattle currently occupy 600+ million acres of land.
Tl;dr: It would be plenty expensive to set up, but the quoted land use reduction seems believable.