Foresight means no CO2 shortage for local brewer

While the CO2 shortage is leaving many a Kiwi brewer high and dry, for one Nelson craft brewery, some forward thinking means it won’t be turning off the taps any time soon.

Eddyline Brewery co-founder Mic Heynekamp has imported a machine to capture and reuse carbon dioxide emissions, in what is believed to be a Kiwi craft brewing first.

Heynekamp first started to investigate carbon capture while running a brewery in the United States in 1999. CO2 was cheap then, he said, but it still ‘‘felt wrong’’ to buy the gas when the brewery was making plenty of it. However, he realised that at the scale the brewery was running, he couldn’t practically find a way to do it.

Usually, breweries produce excess CO2 during fermentation. It is vented into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Then they buy fossil fuel-derived CO2 for production and packaging – which is again vented into the atmosphere.

A year and a half ago, Eddyline market expansion manager Adam Tristram said, Heynekamp had a ‘‘crystal ball’’ moment upon hearing the news that the Marsden Point oil refinery was going to close.

Suspecting that CO2 prices and supply were about to go ‘‘insane’’, Heynekamp reached out to Colorado company Earthly Labs, which had ‘‘miniaturised’’ the carbon capture technology.

The company received the $200,000 unit in 2022, and it was now ‘‘piped and wired in’’, and ready to go once tanks for storing the CO2 arrived in early February.

Heynekamp said that with the elevated price of CO2, the technology would pay for itself in three years.

‘‘But the biggest thing is that it’s available, you have CO2. Without CO2, you are not making beer.’’

The CO2 is used to carbonate beer, to flush the air out of cans during the canning process, and when beer is moved from one tank to another, to make sure that there is no oxygen left in the tank.

Heynekamp said that with the help of the machine, dubbed CiCi, for every four parts of CO2 produced, the brewer only needed to use three. The excess could be bottled to supply to others.

The only domestic producer of food-grade CO2 has been shut for three weeks for safety reasons, and there is no reopening date set.

Breweries like Wellington’s Garage Project have asked for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, the government agency responsible for promoting energy efficiency and conservation, to help fund carbon capture technology.

‘‘With small tweaks to @eeca_nz funding, breweries could be investing in recapture technology to ease national demand and reduce gas imports,’’ the company said in a tweet.

Heynekamp said he ‘‘strongly’’ disagreed with the EECA stance.

He said an email from the agency had told him that his was the fifth

inquiry it had received from independent breweries about funding support for recapture technology.

It said the number of queries had prompted the EECA to ‘‘reconsider their position’’ and spurred ‘‘interesting debate’’, but ‘‘ultimately, due to the biogenic [produced by living organisms] nature of the CO2 emitted, it does not count towards New Zealand’s reduction target, and hence does not qualify for funding support for reusing the emissions’’.

Heynekamp said barley grown for the beer pulled CO2 from the atmosphere, and in the brewing process, yeast consumed the sugars in that barley and re-released carbon dioxide.

‘‘That’s carbon-neutral. But the second we start taking CO2 from burning fossil fuels . . . we’re just venting massive amounts of fossil fuel-derived CO2 into the atmosphere. But if we are catching it from the grain, we are CO2-neutral.’’

Heynekamp said the EECA stance was that recapturing the carbon dioxide was a ‘‘CO2-neutral situation’’, but this did not take into account the fact that brewers were no longer using fossil fuel-derived CO2.

The EECA has been approached for comment.

‘‘Without CO2, you are not making beer.’’

Mic Heynekamp