NASA’s Machines for Mars Make Beer Bubbly

In 2021, Maine Beer Company's carbon dioxide supplier ran short on CO2, and sustainability manager Dave Love warned the brewery risked its beer going stale in the tanks, with no CO2 available for bottling, kegging, or centrifuge operations. The solution the company adopted traced back to NASA's plans for harvesting resources on the Red Planet — and it now saves money and reduces emissions for wineries, distilleries, power companies, helium producers, and others.

Beginning in the 1990s, Pioneer Astronautics won multiple Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts from Johnson Space Center in Houston to build systems that could generate resources on Mars. That technology could, for example, capture carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen to produce water for life support and methane for rocket fuel. Such capabilities were not entirely new, but Pioneer's systems were compact, efficient, and automated. Pioneer Astronautics founder Robert Zubrin later created Pioneer Energy to rearrange these subsystems into technology for the oil and gas industry (Spinoff 2015, 2020), and he soon realized that technology for capturing and purifying carbon dioxide on Mars could do the same job in a brewery — capturing CO2 from the brewing process for use in carbonation. By 2015 the resulting Craft Brewery Recovery System was in production (Spinoff 2016), though the company ultimately put the system up for licensing.

Amy George founded Earthly Labs of Austin, Texas, in 2016 to develop small-scale carbon capture, discovered the Craft Brewery Recovery System, and obtained an exclusive license to it. Carbon dioxide shortages and volatility were worsened by the pandemic reducing its availability, and George said these have emerged as major drivers of interest in the technology. The benefits extend well beyond brewers: after expanding into wineries and distilleries, Earthly Labs began discovering other markets. Energy companies often generate carbon dioxide as a by-product, which they can sell if it is captured, and several are now customers. Another application finding new customers is helium production — helium, used to make microchips and fiber-optic cables among other things, is found in underground deposits mixed with other gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that need to be separated.

In 2021, Earthly Labs was acquired by Chart Industries Inc., which specializes in cryogenic equipment engineering and has helped scale up the technology for applications such as power plants.