ALAMEDA, Calif. — Patrons sipping beer outdoors last weekend as a heat wave hovered over Alameda, Calif., might not have been thinking about climate change. But whoever produced the IPAs and lagers certainly was.
That’s because the bubbles came from carbon dioxide captured in the brewery’s parking lot.
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“We are literally taking carbon out of the environment,” said Damian Fagan, director of Almanac Beer Co. “It’s quite surreal and incredible.”
The technology that made this air-to-beer carbonation possible — a machine that resembles an industrial air-conditioning unit with a chimney on top — was in the back of the brewpub.
It performs direct air capture on site, and another system, installed in a container next door, liquefies the captured carbon dioxide and transforms it into a pure product, suitable for drinks.
To curb global warming, carbon dioxide will have to be managed like any other waste stream, and direct air capture will 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.
“Direct air capture creates the possibility of not only addressing current and future emissions,” he said, “but also the historical accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
While air capture machines in some bars won’t solve global warming, the devices, made by Aircapture, a company based in nearby Berkeley, could be “extremely helpful for the climate,” Realff said, if they help make carbon capture cheaper and more widely available.
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Technology has advanced significantly in the last 15 years, but scaling up and reducing costs remain major challenges.
In the United States, direct air capture projects tend to be large and focused on removing at least 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year at a fixed location.
After years of federal support, major projects have recently been delayed or canceled, however, because of funding cuts by the Trump administration. “If before there was a strong tailwind, now there is a headwind,” said Realff, who is also not involved with Aircapture.
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Aircapture is trying to address some of these challenges by creating an agile, modular system that can be scaled up “not by making it bigger, but by producing more units,” Realff said. “This is a very unique approach, with the potential to be deployed relatively easily around the world.”
Aircapture managed to avoid dependence on federal funding, carbon credits or tax incentives by betting on the $20 billion commercial carbon dioxide market.
“The global economy runs on carbon dioxide,” said Matt Atwood, the company’s founder and CEO. “It’s in the food chain, the cold chain, the built environment, agriculture, beverages. It’s everywhere.”
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Still, around the world, the carbon dioxide market is becoming more volatile. For business owners like Fagan, securing gas supply is a constant source of stress. “It’s something you use every day, which is expensive, increasingly difficult to obtain and harmful to the environment,” he said.
Most carbon dioxide destined for the commercial market is captured as a byproduct of other industries, including fossil fuels. But this dependence makes supply vulnerable to fluctuations in oil and gas prices, as well as plant closures.
In some cases, companies that produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct are choosing not to sell it and instead capture and store it underground, a process known as carbon sequestration, because of government incentives or requirements.
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Ethanol plants, for example, account for about 35% of North America’s carbon dioxide supply. But because of tax credits, storing the gas underground now earns these facilities “several times more revenue than selling CO2 to gas companies,” Atwood said. This is creating a growing gap between supply and demand.
The commercial carbon dioxide industry also has a high carbon footprint. For every ton of that gas received by a customer, the production behind that CO2 could be releasing 2 or more tons into the atmosphere, Atwood said. Furthermore, commercial products are often transported over long distances.
Aircapture aims to offer an alternative, Atwood said. Its machines capture 100 to 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, depending on size, and can be mass-produced like cars, allowing the company to respond quickly to demand.
Aircapture declined to disclose details about its machine’s power consumption to Almanac. But an independent life cycle assessment conducted for a U.S. Department of Energy project found the system’s carbon footprint is less than 10% of what it captures, Atwood said.
Almanac currently produces 20% of its beer with air capture on site, and Fagan said he hopes to reach 100% within a year.
In addition to solving reliability problems, the new technology is generating savings for the brewery. Instead of purchasing Aircapture’s carbon capture machines, customers like Almanac purchase the carbon dioxide these machines produce. Atwood compared the arrangement to the model used by hospitals when purchasing industrial oxygen from on-site plants owned by other companies.
Liquid carbon dioxide purchased through Aircapture is 15% to 20% cheaper than conventional commercial products. That’s tens of thousands of dollars in savings over the course of the year, Fagan said. “We’re a small, local business,” he said, “and it’s already making a real impact.”
“The fact that this is better for the environment is a great added benefit,” he said.
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