The beer drinkers having a pint outside this weekend as a heat wave hung over Alameda, Calif., might not have been thinking about climate change. But the people who brewed the I.P.A. and lagers definitely were.
That’s because the bubbles came from carbon dioxide captured in the brewery’s parking lot.
“We’re literally taking carbon out of the environment,” Damian Fagan, the head of the Almanac Beer Company, said. “It’s pretty surreal and amazing.”
The technology that made this air-to-beer carbonation possible, a machine that looks something like an oversize HVAC unit with a chimney on top, was out behind the brewpub. It performs direct air capture on the spot, and another system sitting in a shipping container alongside liquefies the captured carbon dioxide and turns it into a pure, beverage-grade product.
To curtail global warming, carbon dioxide will need to be managed like any other waste stream, and direct air capture will most likely play a role in that, said Matthew Realff, a chemical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is not involved with the brewery. “D.A.C. creates the option to not only address current and future emissions,” he said, “but also to address our historical additions of CO2 to the atmosphere.”
While air capture machines at a few pubs won’t solve global warming, the devices, made by Aircapture, a company based in nearby Berkeley, could be “extremely useful for the climate,” Dr. Realff said, if they help to make carbon capture cheaper and more widely available. The technology has progressed significantly over the past 15 years, but scaling it up and bringing down costs remain major challenges.
In the United States, direct air capture projects tend to be large and focused on removing at least a million tons of carbon dioxide annually around a fixed site. After years of federal support, major projects have recently been delayed or canceled, however, because of funding cuts by the Trump administration. “Whereas there was a strong tailwind, there is now a headwind,” said Dr. Realff, who is also not involved with Aircapture.
Aircapture is trying to address some of these challenges by creating a nimble, modular system, one that can be scaled “not by making it bigger, but by making more of it,” Dr. Realff said. “This is a pretty unique approach that has the potential to be relatively easily deployed around the world.”
Aircapture managed to sidestep reliance on federal funding, carbon credits or tax incentives by leaning into the $20 billion market for commercial carbon dioxide.
“The global economy runs on carbon dioxide,” Matt Atwood, the company’s founder and chief executive, said. “It’s in the food chain, the cold chain, the built environment, agriculture, beverages. It’s all over the place.”
Yet around the world, the carbon dioxide market is becoming more volatile. For business owners like Mr. Fagan, securing carbon dioxide is a constant source of stress. “It’s something you use every day that’s costly, increasingly difficult to source and hard on the environment,” he said.
Most carbon dioxide for the commercial market is captured as a byproduct from other industries, including fossil fuels. But that reliance makes its supply vulnerable to swings in oil and gas prices, as well as plant closures.
In some cases, companies that produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct are opting not to sell it and are instead capturing it and storing it underground, a process known as carbon sequestration, because of government incentives or mandates. Ethanol plants, for example, account for about 35 percent of the carbon dioxide supply in North America. But because of tax credits, sequestering the gas underground now earns those facilities “many multiples of revenue compared with selling CO2 to gas companies,” Mr. Atwood said. That’s creating a growing demand-supply gap.
The commercial carbon dioxide industry also has a high carbon footprint. For every ton of that gas that a customer receives, the production behind that CO2 could be releasing two or more tons into the atmosphere, Mr. Atwood said. And, commercial products are often transported long distances.
Aircapture aims to provide an alternative, Mr. Atwood said. Its machines capture 100 to 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, depending on the size of the machine, and can be mass produced like cars, allowing the company to respond to demand quickly.
Aircapture declined to disclose details of the energy consumption of its machine at Almanac. But an independent life cycle assessment conducted for a U.S. Department of Energy project found that the system’s carbon footprint is less than 10 percent of what it captures, Mr. Atwood said.
Still, Mr. Fagan was skeptical when he received an email last year, out of the blue, suggesting that his brewery could be a pilot site for Aircapture’s technology. “My immediate response was, ‘This sounds a little crazy,’” he recalled. “It just seemed too good to believe.”
He agreed to a meeting, though, because of the increasing unreliability of the carbon dioxide deliveries he needed to produce 15,000 barrels of beer per year. The commercial vendors he works with regularly skip or cut back on deliveries, he said, causing major disruptions. In the autumn, Almanac had to halt production for two days for lack of carbon dioxide, putting wholesale contracts in jeopardy and cutting into the company’s bottom line.
“Without CO2, we can’t brew beer, we can’t package beer and we can’t serve beer,” Mr. Fagan said. With carbon dioxide produced at the brewery, he added, “suddenly, those problems go away.”
Almanac is currently making 20 percent of its beer with on-site air capture, and Mr. Fagan said he expected to be at 100 percent within the year.
In addition to solving problems of reliability, the new technology is saving the brewery money. Rather than buying carbon-capture machines from Aircapture, customers like Almanac purchase the carbon dioxide those machines produce. Mr. Atwood compared the arrangement to the model hospitals use when buying industrial oxygen from on-site plants owned by other companies.
Liquid carbon dioxide purchased through Aircapture is 15 to 20 percent cheaper than conventional commercial products. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars in savings over the year, Mr. Fagan said. “We’re a small local business,” he said, “and this is already making a real impact.”
“The fact that this is better for the environment is a great side benefit,” he said.
To announce the new partnership, on Saturday, Almanac debuted a special version of Flow, a West Coast pale ale. Liz Seiderman, an Almanac patron who was at the brewery with her family, said she ordered a pint because she was looking for something “nice and refreshing on a hot day like today.”
The beer’s climate profile was an added bonus. “I think it’s great that they’re moving into being more environmentally conscious and innovative,” she said.
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