BrewRight is on a mission to help the fermentation industry become more circular by valorizing its biogenic CO2 waste stream. Especially, small and microbreweries have the highest need at this moment. They produce and emit CO2 during alcoholic fermentation and simultaneously buy fossil-based food-grade CO2. With the increasing food-grade CO2 prizes, this has become a pressing sustainability and cost issue. BrewRight in collaboration with TNO investigated to what extent cryogenic carbon capture can be used to circularize these craft breweries. To do so, they have designed and modelled a small scale cryogenic distillation column and used various cost estimating methods to determine its commercial viability for a range of brewery sizes.
For large breweries with 1E7, 1E6 and 1E5 annual hectolitre (hL) beer production, levelized cost of CO2 recovery were well below 1 €/kg. Hence resulting in viable payback times. However, for medium, small and microbreweries (1E5 – 1E3 hL beer production per year) the CAPEX and OPEX were too significant to yield a commercially attractive solution. For now this led to the decision not to continue the development of a cryogenic carbon capture system for Microbreweries. Instead BrewRight will continue developing its other research line which has demonstrated promising results.