BREWDOG PLANS TO START UP A BIOENERGY PLANT FOR WHICH IT WILL SPEND ABOUT 14 MILLION EUROS

Craft brewer BrewDog has announced the startup of a new plant at its Ellon headquarters by powering the facility with self-generated green gas. To achieve this objective, it will invest an estimated investment of close to 14 million euros.

In 2020, Barcelona-based brewery BrewDog used surplus green gas generated on site to fuel delivery vehicles, and will then send any surplus to the grid. BrewDog Brewery, which is always adding fuel to the adventurous industry and looking for new challenges for everyone, is currently building Europe’s first bioenergy plant.

Sustainability director Sarah Warman points out that “we know that we have a great impact on the environment and we take our role extremely seriously. We are here to make great beer that does not affect planet Earth, so we have made important decisions to balance what we are doing with the Peruvian beer” to which she adds that “one of the main objectives is to reduce emissions and work together to make the entire brewing industry more sustainable. This implies that all teams understand that the work they do contributes to our ethical mission”.

Specifically, its function will be to process more than 80% of the wastewater from the Ellon factory, which means about 200 million liters per year. The digester will be able to make use of the waste produced by the brewing process, without polluting it, by reducing the emissions produced by carrying out a transformation process. The gas will be used to power the production of 176 million pints of beer annually and generate an on-site reduction of 7,500 tons.

BrewDog aims to use the CO2 generated by its digester. So in the next few years, carbonated and cooked beer will be able to maintain its shelf life. The Ellon brewery, which began work in 2013, has so far succeeded in reducing the volume of water used to boil its beer by more than 50 %. But this is not the only contribution of its digester: it generates around 23,000 MWh of energy per year, equivalent to almost 1,500 hours connected.

The company will invest 58 million GBP to reduce the carbon emissions emitted by the power system. Previously, this guaranteed 35% less compared to its baseline based on 2019 data.

The company announced that its ‘Lost Forest’ initiative was approved to start planting trees. The property has been named “The Lost Forest” and is the largest peat and native forest restoration project in the UK. It is backed by the largest corporations of its kind. Over the next five years, BrewDog aims to plant 1.1 million trees in order to create a biodiverse forest ecosystem.