Give it some gas

Opinion

7 Feb

Michael Donaldson examines the CO2 shortage and what could lie ahead for brewers and consumers...

One day we were talking the carbon dioxide crisis, then the next day Jacinda Ardern resigned unexpectedly. I’m only slightly kidding, but imagine if the country ran out of beer! What Prime Minister could survive that?

Joking aside, I do think the CO2 shortage is a political problem to a large extent – not because of the beer angle, but because CO2 is so critical, in many unseen ways, for so much of modern living: from medicine to food safety.

The closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery and then the safety shut down of the Todd Energy Kapuni plant in January led to New Zealand running out of domestically produced CO2 for a period.

Garage Project helped put the CO2 ball in the government’s court, with their agenda-setting tweet in January when they announced they were officially out of CO2 at one of their production sites and added: “With small tweaks to @eeca_nz funding breweries could be investing in recapture technology to ease national demand & reduce gas imports.”

They are referring to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, which is funded by the various levies we pay for fuel, gas and electricity. EECA made a big deal last year about helping breweries to reduce their carbon emissions and they offer co-funding to help businesses meet emissions goals.

Co-founder of Garage Project, Jos Ruffell, said tweaks to EECA funding could help breweries afford expensive carbon capturing technology. EECA had declined Garage Project’s application for funding, which Ruffell said was largely because its area in the industry was out of the scope of the authority’s mandate. They have a $250,000 carbon capture system on order from the US.

Carbon dioxide is used not only to make beer (and other beverages) fizzy, but for other tasks inside the brewery such as clean-in-place and purging oxygen from bottles and cans before they are filled. There are ways around some of these things with nitrogen but carbonation is the big one.

“It all adds up to New Zealand being in a precarious position and until the problem is sorted out some smaller breweries may struggle.”

Carbon capture kits can ensure self- sufficiency in a brewery as CO2 is one of the main outputs from fermentation and nearly all of it goes to waste. Capturing it for re-use solves two problems: helping the brewery, and reducing its carbon emissions. The kits are expensive, although Nelson’s Eddyline wisely invested in one last year and the big breweries have them, which ensures they can continue to produce the bulk of the beer consumed in New Zealand.

At the time of writing, the Kapuni plant is back operating at 30%, but it will need another shutdown and won’t be back to 100% until the end of April. Having just one domestic source of CO2 is a concern and MBIE is working with a number of interested parties on long-term solutions.

The other alternative is imported CO2 but that’s also costly and subject to fragilities of CO2 supply on a global scale. The rising cost of gas prices from the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and they were already going up before that) has impacted CO2 production in Britain, where the bulk of their supply comes from fertiliser producers who need natural gas to drive the process. They’d already had shutdowns before the Russian invasion.

The United States had its own crisis caused by a drop in ethanol production as Americans stayed at home during the pandemic and didn’t need ethanol for fuel. No ethanol production, no CO2 as a by-product. And then America’s biggest natural supply of CO2 in Jackson Dome, Mississippi, got contaminated.

It all adds up to New Zealand being in a precarious position and until the problem is sorted out some smaller breweries may struggle.

However, it’s in bars where the current high prices and shortages might have a huge impact. Because taplines require CO2 to push the beer out of kegs and into glasses, if prices go up too much or there’s simply no supply, bars will need to switch to nitrogen, or more likely they will do away with draught beer and just serve packaged options.