When you think of Colorado, what comes to your mind?

In my case, it’s Pike’s Peak (a water reuse facility exists there), Aspen,  Denver, and Coors.  (No, I don’t really drink their beer.  I knew the firm for years because they made chemical apparatus [yes, they started during Prohibition]- and because their cans use ultraviolet light curing of their labels.)  Oh, yeah, pot is legal in Colorado.  (They love the idea of mile-high living, I guess.)

Well, those last two concepts- beer and pot- are coming together in a special way there, too.

First a little biochemical engineering.  (Come on, you know that’s my field!)

When beer is being produced, carbon dioxide is released.  How much, you ask?  How about 15 g of CO₂ per pint of beer.   (That’s about 7 liters of carbon dioxide at standard temperature and pressure.)  Oh, and an average tree will absorb some 59.65 g of CO₂  a day.  (You do notice I am not including the footprint that the electricity or natural gas (for heating) consumed in making beer employs.  Just the carbon dioxide liberated by the production process.)

Given these facts, would it surprise you that one craft brewery (Denver Beer Company) has decided to create some good will (and lots of publicity- even I am falling for this act) with a new program.  One developed by Earthly Labs.

Earthly Labs (Austin, TX) is also covering a lot of bases.  First of all, it is a “benefit” corporation.  And, it has “scaled down” processes that big breweries have been using for a while.  The capture and recover of carbon dioxide. (This is not the first such instance- Earthly Labs have their equipment installed and running in some 20 facilities across the USA.)  Earthly hopes its process will help collect one 1 billion metric tons of CO₂ by 2030- or the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by some 250  coal-fired power plants each year.

So, now three small craft breweries will use Earthly’s process to capture the carbon dioxide emitted during fermentation, precluding its venting and mixing with our atmosphere.  To render the CO₂ easier to handle, it will be cooled into liquid form and stored in 750 pound tanks.  That’s the amount of CO₂ emitted from the production of some 22680 pints of beer (2835 gallons of beer).

Those tanks will then be transported about 9 miles, where the CO₂ will be vaporized (converted from liquid to gas) and pumped into rooms where the pot is growing.  (At a place called “The Clinic”.) The  goal is to enhance photosynthesis- and the growth of the pot plants.  (Most marijuana growers have determined that tripling the CO₂ in the atmosphere greatly enhances the growing process.)

(Maybe this is a good time to remind you that there are some 1150 licensed marijuana growers in the state.  And, about 400 craft breweries.)

Right now, this is going to be a 4 month pilot project, partially funded by the State of Colorado.  The goal of this test phase is to see if this concept will replace the CO₂ the marijuana growers get delivered and trucked all over the state. (This means fewer truck miles- and trucks are fairly high contributors to greenhouse gases, to boot.)

While this is a pilot project, the economics should prove the reason to continue. Denver Brewing can supply the Clinic the CO₂ for about 37 cents a pound (a 15% savings off manufactured CO₂ costs).   That means ‘The Clinic’ can add $ 12000 a year to its bottom line.

Oh- and Denver Beer plans to use some of the captured CO₂ to carbonate its beer, as well.

( I thought this would be a good topic for today, since many of you are off celebrating this synthetic holiday.  I’m busy doing taxes!)