The Qatar 2022 World Cup is getting closer and with it comes a huge increase in the sale of beer on a worldwide scale and, perhaps most notably, in the famous British pubs!

Although this year nobody will forget the beer shortage during the previous World Cup in Russia 2018 when a heatwave across Great Britain coincided with an inspired English football team whose performances took them to the semi-finals of the tournament for the first time in 28 years; the combination of which resulted in incredible levels of beer consumption. 

But let’s get to the origin of the problem and discover the whys and wherefores of the importance of biogas to the brewery industry, the economy and the environment.

Carbon dioxide is a gas produced by the yeast during the beer fermentation process in which the sugars in the wort are converted primarily into alcohol and CO₂. Additional CO₂ is often added to barrels, bottles and cans of beer, usually after filtration. The majority of this CO₂, denominated food-grade, comes from ammonia plants which manufacture fertilisers and which normally reduce their production through the summer months.  

During the summer of 2018, a series of factory closures throughout the continent, due to either maintenance and/or seasonal repair work, caused a record shortage of CO₂. In Great Britain, only one factory remained open whilst it was predicted that the British football fans would consume more than 14 million pints of beer during the football World Cup.

This series of events resulted in beer sale rationing in supermarkets and a shortage of barrelled beer in British pubs, meanwhile, the demand for food-grade CO₂ ensured that its price quintupled, rising from £200/tonne to around £1,000/tonne.

So how can Biogas influence in all of this?

Well, this can be explained by way of a benchmark project in the sector which is taking place in Scotland, and which having started as a small independent brewery, has now become the first brewery in the world with negative carbon emissions.

In the small town of Ellon, which is just 25 km from Aberdeen, Brewdog has incorporated into its eco-plant a process chain which starts with the production of biogas from the fermentation liquids, themselves a by-product of the beer distillation.

In a second process, a 600 Nm³/h flow of this biogas is processed by way of a biogas upgrading system. This system uses high selectivity membrane technology and ultimately obtains a primary biomethane stream, one part of which is injected into the natural gas grid whilst another part is used as fuel by the brewery’s fleet of beer delivery vehicles.

The switch from diesel to biomethane by this fleet of lorries has produced a reduction in emissions of close to 80%

As a result of the separation of gases from the upgrading process, a secondary stream of CO₂ is obtained which by the end of this year, will be processed by means of a capture and filtration system where it will attain CO₂ food-grade category. It will then be reused as additional CO₂ in barrelled, bottled and canned beers in the brewery’s own factory thereby obviating the need for CO₂ from alternative sources as well as mitigating the risk of CO₂ shortages similar to those suffered during the last World Cup.