Australian beer brewers hop onto a novel (and slimy) way to fight carbon

Sydney — Australian beer makers have brewed up a novel way to fight climate change: capturing the carbon dioxide produced by fermenting hops and feeding it to micro-algae.

The carbon emitted by fermenting hops to make a six-pack of beer can take a tree two days to absorb, experts say. To tackle that problem, the founders of Young Henrys brewery in Sydney teamed up with scientists to set up two “bioreactors” filled with trillions of the tiny organisms.

Inside the two 400l bioreactors at the company’s brewery, the algae absorb the carbon, then reproduce and transform it into oxygen. Each bioreactor produces as much oxygen as 2ha of bushland, Young Henrys co-founder Oscar McMahon said.

“We could knock down our whole site and plant trees, and ... it would take years before they did the same amount of carbon sequestration and oxygen creation as those two bioreactors,” McMahon said. “As an urban carbon sequestration and oxygen producing solution, it’s mind-blowing.”

The Young Henrys team and the scientists from University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have also joined industry group Meat & Livestock Australia to investigate whether the algae could be used to offset the methane emissions of Australian livestock.

“Instead of us digging something up, making a product and then throwing it away, we circularise it and we’re actually going to use our carbon effectively,” said Prof Peter Ralph, the executive director of the Climate Change Cluster at the UTS.

Australia, one of the world’s top producers of coal and gas, has adopted a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said he would not legislate the target. 

Reuters