Earthly Labs takes on-site CO2 recovery beyond breweries

By Rebecca Stone

Earthly Labs’ carbon-capture systems can produce about 150 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour for a brewery, compared with 3,000 pounds or more per hour for a biogas plant, founder Amy George said.

“The revenue lost by dumping one batch of beer is well over $100,000,” Maine Beer Company sustainability manager Dave Love said. The brewery has not halted production during two supplier shortages since it acquired an Earthly Labs carbon-capture system in 2022.

The brewery still purchases more than half of its carbon dioxide, leaving the CiCi unit as a supply buffer rather than its sole source. A 2021 shortage threatened to make beer go stale in tanks and cut gas for bottling, kegging and centrifuge operations; inconsistent deliveries forced Maine Beer to conserve supplies and maintain output.

Love identified supply-chain security as the system’s chief selling point and said the recovered volume was enough to get through a crisis. The disruption revived an earlier plan to capture carbon dioxide from fermentation for carbonation. Consumable CO2, often a by-product of oil drilling and refining, became scarce as automobile use and air travel fell during the pandemic, and periodic shortages have continued.

Earthly Labs has expanded from breweries into wineries, distilleries, energy companies and helium production. George said shortages and price volatility over the last five years, together with standards and incentives for reducing emissions, drove interest in systems that save money and cut emissions.

Earthly Labs’ recovered carbon dioxide is closer to 100 percent pure, against the 99.5 percent minimum for beverage-grade gas. That purity gives the company an advantage with beverage customers, which require a reliable supply of carbonation gas.

Earthly Labs also serves energy companies that generate carbon dioxide as a by-product and can capture it for sale. Several are customers, including waste-to-energy plants, which often require large systems; George said carbon capture also boosts those operators’ image as the practice gains popularity as a greener option.

Chart Industries acquired Earthly Labs in 2021 but retained the brand. George said the cryogenic-equipment engineering specialist helped scale systems for power-plant applications and spread the technology internationally. She estimated more than 100 customers across Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Brazil, with about 60 jobs at home growing quickly.

Where did the technology come from?

The system descends from NASA work designed to extract resources from elements available on Mars’ surface. Beginning in the late 1990s, Pioneer Astronautics won multiple Small Business Innovation Research contracts from Johnson Space Center in Houston to build systems for those resources. The underlying capabilities were not entirely new, but Pioneer built them compact, efficient and automated.

Pioneer founder Robert Zubrin, an advocate for human travel to Mars, coauthored the 1990 Mars Direct plan. He developed a chain that captures carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and combines it with hydrogen to produce water for life support and methane for rocket fuel.

Splitting the water yields oxygen for life support and hydrogen for further methane production; frozen water under the Martian surface was not known then. In 2008, Zubrin founded Pioneer Energy to rearrange the subsystems for oil and gas use on Earth.

The same capture, purification, pressurization and liquefaction process can recover fermentation carbon dioxide. Most major brewers had carbon-capture technology, but nothing was available for the microbreweries that had proliferated for more than a decade.

By late 2015, Pioneer’s automated and modular Craft Brewery Recovery System was in production for breweries producing up to 60,000 barrels per year, with stacked units able to accommodate higher output. Pioneer kept its focus on oil and gas and made the system available for licensing.

Amy George founded Earthly Labs in Austin, Texas, in 2016 to develop small-scale carbon capture, which she found virtually nonexistent at the time. She selected microbreweries as the first target and obtained an exclusive license from Pioneer Energy.

“Most of the effort and policy had been focused on the largest emitters, and this represented a way for others to participate,” George said. Earthly Labs then branded the technology CiCi, for carbon capture, and packaged it in three systems for different capacities.

What happens in Minnesota?

Helium production has brought Earthly Labs several new customers. The relatively new industry once fell under the purview of the United States government. In 2024, Pulsar Helium signed an agreement with Chart for Earthly Labs to conduct engineering studies for a possible helium purification plant in Minnesota.

The agreement covers engineering studies rather than construction, and the Minnesota facility remains a proposal. If the project advances, Earthly Labs would separate and purify both helium and carbon dioxide for sale. Abraham-James said efficiency and reduced operating costs were the main benefits, while Chart’s acquisition added helium expertise and an in-house combination he did not believe another company had.

Recovered carbon dioxide can carbonate beverages, preserve food, manage drinking-water acidity, promote greenhouse plant growth, make dry ice and help extract oil from wells. The Minnesota proposal would add helium to that product mix if the studies support development.

The next milestone is the result of Pulsar’s 2024 engineering studies and a decision on whether to build the Minnesota plant. Until that decision, the project provides no operating capacity, and Earthly Labs’ expansion into helium remains contingent rather than committed.