Co2 Beer Emissions

[agraham]

Heya All,

I was wondering whether signing up to Kyoto will impact how many batches of frothies we can brew, as c02 is the by product of fermentation. :beerbang:

Beers,

Andrew

 

[DJR]

Heya All,

I was wondering whether signing up to Kyoto will impact how many batches of frothies we can brew, as c02 is the by product of fermentation. :beerbang:

Beers,

Andrew

Just plant some more hop plants and barley to absorb the CO2 and make more ingredients

 

[lou]

Just plant some more hop plants and barley to absorb the CO2 and make more ingredients

but I'm on water restrictions



lou

 

[ant]

As geeky as this sounds - I put together this spreadsheet last week to work this out, but in essence, you need to plant a gum tree to offset your CO2 emissions for every 200 brews at OG of 1.050...

For those interested in the spreadsheet, just add in the number of brews you make per annum at the gravities listed, and it will tell you how many trees you need to plant. Maybe I should work it out on hop vine instead? :blink:

View attachment GHG_Fermentation_Offsets.xls

 

[Voosher]

Can Admin please retitle the "How much have you brewed this year?" thread to
"How many gum trees have you planted this year?"

Thanks.
:huh:

 

[Guest Lurker]

Nice work Ant. This comes up every now and then, and I once worked out that the impact of home brew CO2 is about 1% of a cow standing in a field farting.

http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...p;hl=greenhouse

 

[Uncle Fester]

I figure that if I wasn't dispending CO2 at a very restrained 12 PSI from my "Red" cylinder, then some ecological vandal would be dousing fires with it instead!

Fester

 

[davidp]

I'd have thought fermentation would be close to carbon neutral - given the carbon would have originated from sugars in the barley, which are created by pulling CO2 from the atmosphere in the first place. This of course doesn't take into account the use of petrochemicals in fertilisers, transport, malting process, etc.

Am I missing something?

 

[Ken Man Do]

I measure my CO2 output. A 1.060 beer will put out about 95 liters of CO2 for each 3.8 liters of wort, for whatever that's worth!

 

[ant]

I'd have thought fermentation would be close to carbon neutral - given the carbon would have originated from sugars in the barley, which are created by pulling CO2 from the atmosphere in the first place. This of course doesn't take into account the use of petrochemicals in fertilisers, transport, malting process, etc.

Am I missing something?

Now a lifecycle assessment of GHG from beer brewing would be entirely different. When you factor in emissions from importation of grain/hops/yeast from UK/US/Europe (particularly if it's air freighted) homebrewing would certainly not be anywhere near a carbon neutral activity. If you sourced everything locally, back of thumb calcs suggest to me that yep, the rapid growth of grain and hops would consume big enough chunks of CO2 during photosynthesis to probably leave you carbon positive.

 

[Sammus]

What about boiling to make the wort? burning all that gas lets off a huge amount of C02, doing it for a couple hours (heating strike water as well) I think would make the process give out more CO2 than is absorbed by hop and grain plants...

 

[Brewtus]

If you look at the '2006 Hop plantaion threads you will find the true AHB greenies.

 

[Adamt]

LPG (Propane) combusting completely yields 3 molecules of CO2 per molecule propane. 1L of compressed Propane ~= 270L uncompressed propane => 810L CO2 per L of LPG burnt.

You do the maths with your burner/fuel consumption. Sounds like the CO2 thrown from the burner is more of an environmental concern than the fermenter farting.