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Guinness’ flagship brewery in Dublin is swapping out fossil fuels for electric heat pumps and biogas as it seeks to slash greenhouse gas emissions and become more efficient.
Parent company Diageo has announced plans to invest more than €100 million to decarbonise the historic St. James’s Gate facility, where Guinness has been brewed for 264 years. Until now, the facility has relied on either coal or gas for its power, steam and heating requirements.
The shift to electric heat pumps and biogas — which will be generated within a new water recovery unit — will allow the brewery to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels and reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions by more than 90%, according to Diageo. The new system will also reduce water use by some 30%.
“Industry is a key pillar of national and global efforts to address climate change, and it is welcome and important that Diageo is showing leadership by decarbonising its operations here in its home city,” Irish prime minister Simon Harris said in a statement. The government will also help fund the project.
Ireland’s minster for enterprise, trade and employment, Peter Burke said the investment will “foster innovation, job creation and long-term economic stability,” while also demonstrating that sustainable practices are “economically savvy.”
Other breweries have already made the switch from fossil fuels, which have long been relied on to produce the electricity, heat, and steam the beer-making process requires.
Scotland’s Cairngorm Brewery recently adopted a hybrid system that includes solar panels and heat pumps, as did Melbourne’s oldest independent brewer.
Heineken’s Manchester brewery is in the process of swapping out gas-fired steam boilers for a heat pump network that captures and reuses heat from the beer-making process.
“Heat pumps are a key technology on our journey to decarbonising our breweries and enable us to create a circular process,” Chelsey Wroe, head of sustainability at Heineken UK, said in a statement last year.
