A pub in California is pulling carbon dioxide from the air to carbonate pints. If the business model works, it could give the broader carbon-capture industry a boost.
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This isn’t really storage… All of that C02 will be released when that beer is opened and consumed.
But I don’t drink alcohol, so when I buy the beer the CO2 remains captured! Now I just need a very large cellar. Would the beer store more CO2 per volume than balloons filled with my exhale? So many open research questions, affordable carbon capture breakthrough any time now! /s
Indeed. The CO2 isn’t digested by humans, so it fizzes right back out of the drink or gurgles out from the drinker.
Then again, the headline is somewhat misleading as the product the article covers isn’t for carbon sequestration. Instead, it’s to provide consumers of CO2 like breweries with a reliable and supposedly low carbon alternative for their CO2 gas needs. Normally this CO2 would be a waste product from refineries, but these incur more inefficiencies due to transportation. Also, recently the refineries have been opting to sequester their CO2 instead of selling it (which is a good thing IMO).
I’m reporting all of this from the contents of the article; I haven’t verified any of the claims.
Beats having to use another source of co2 and letting all this be in the atmosphere anyway ig?
The dissolved oxygen has to leave the beer somehow to get the yeast to produce alcohol. You could use some energy-intensive process to remove the oxygen, but otherwise it naturally gets turned into the CO2 beer drinkers expect. And I doubt that energy-intensive process would be worth it in the end.
Though maybe the naturally present oxygen isn’t enough to make it as carbonated as consumers expect, and more air or CO2 is pumped in to make it more carbonated. In that case using captured CO2 instead of letting the yeast turn some more of the wheat into CO2 would make a difference.
Yeah thats sorta where im at on it but i dont know enough about beer to really know