At last year's product competition, Air presented its vodka in a blind tasting session and won a gold medal. Dr. Sheehan invented the technology for making alcohol from carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. That is, in fact, his company gets vodka out of thin air.
In 2017, chemist Stafford Sheehan gave a friend an unusual bottle of booze. He made the drink himself - but in a very peculiar way. Dr. Sheehan invented the technology for making alcohol from carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to climate change.
"I said," What, did you make it out of carbon dioxide? " - recalled his friend Gregory Constantine (Gregory Constantine), who worked in the field of marketing and advertised Smirnoff vodka. Both of them are now running the vodka business using Dr. Sheehan's technology and touting their products as a means of fighting global warming.
Their company, Air Co., is among the 10 finalists for two $ 7.5 million prizes to be awarded this year to teams that have found the most profitable way to use carbon dioxide. This gas causes global warming by trapping solar energy when it is released into the atmosphere by power plants, cars and industrial plants. This five-year competition aims to create financial incentives for CO2 capture and profitable use.
But as our Brooklyn-based vodka makers, along with nine other finalists from various locations (Nova Scotia - stronger concrete, India - a pharmaceutical ingredient, China - a plastic replacement), the competition had to be stopped due to the coronavirus.
“There’s a lot of confusion,” said Canadian physicist Marcius Extavour, who leads the energy group at the Exprise Foundation, which has given out multimillion-dollar prizes in the past for things from reusable manned spacecraft to creating water from air. "We still haven't recovered from the blows."
The unusual competition is a reminder that while the world is focusing on the coronavirus, other, slower crises such as climate change continue to grow, Ekstavour said. The past decade has been the warmest on record, and the polar ice cap is melting six times faster today than in the 1990s.
The COVID-19 pandemic also shows how dangerous it is to stay idle until the problem gets out of control, and only then take adequate measures to address it, Ekstavour said. “This award is an attempt to stay ahead of the curve,” he added.
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Instead of focusing on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the organizers approached the problem from a different angle. The fund proposed creating financial incentives for companies that produce large quantities of carbon dioxide if they find a way to use it rather than emit it into the atmosphere. Technically this is possible, but it does not give any profit.
To receive the prize, funded by NRG Energy and a coalition of Canadian tar sands oil companies, each of the 10 finalist teams had to move their equipment and personnel to two locations, one to Calgary, and the second in Gillette, Wyoming. There they had to demonstrate their projects in operation and submit data confirming their application.
But there are three finalists outside of North America: one in India, one in Scotland and one in China. They cannot fly to the United States and Canada, and those American teams that were supposed to go to Calgary were also blocked, since crossing the border is now prohibited.
Dr. Ekstavour said no new dates have been set for the final round of the competition. For this reason, teams fighting for money found themselves in a difficult position, having lost the opportunity to attract the attention of potential investors and clients for a while.
“We should have the opportunity to win this big prize,” said Rob Niven, founder of Nova Scotia-based CarbonCure, which was among the finalists.
Crazy enough idea
In 2005, Niven, who was studying at McGill University in Montreal at the time, attended a nearby UN conference on climate change. There, he heard representatives of the Pacific island states say that due to the rise in water levels in the ocean, their countries are losing not only their land, but also their history and identity. “This is real grief,” he said.
Niven wrote his master's thesis on how to convert carbon dioxide into concrete. After graduation, he decided to take the CAD $ 10,000 left over from his unused student loan and follow his girlfriend to Halifax to put his idea into practice.
The first year was terrible. “Everyone thought I was wasting time,” Niven said. But a lot changed when a local concrete company agreed to put it into their plant to experiment with using the technology in practice.
“This is a pretty crazy idea that can work,” the plant owner told Niven.
Through several experiments, Niven found one method to convert batching plants to use less cement, which is the most expensive and carbon-intensive component of concrete. To do this, at the end of the technological operation, carbon dioxide must be injected into the concrete. The company received money from a venture capital fund chaired by Bill Gates.
Niven hoped that with a prize, or at least a visual presentation of his technology, he could quickly implement it in production. “At this rate of growth, we mean nothing,” he said. - We are trying to solve the problem of climate change. And we don't have time to beat around the bush."
Skateboards first, then aviation fuel
Another competitor, Daymenshinal Energy, owes its existence to Jason Salfi's decision to leave the skateboard company.
Salfi founded the Comet company, which made boards from sustainable materials such as sustainable timber. In 2014, he began working for a New York State organization that aims to help researchers translate their green energy ideas into reality.
In 2016, Sulfi became familiar with the designs of two inventors at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who independently developed methods to convert carbon dioxide into energy. He realized that each of them had a piece of the puzzle that the other needed, and they had no time to do business. At the same time, he heard about the Exprise Foundation, with its 20 millionth purse.
“I thought then: wow, we're all in Ithaca,” said Salfi, who invited the inventors to work together. "In fact, the main operating principle was: start a company and compete for a carbon prize."
They established Daymenshinal Energy and Salfi became its CEO. This technology uses concentrated sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into an industrial energy source, such as syngas, which is then used to make aviation fuel, diesel fuel, and other liquid fuels.
“We are copying natural photosite,” Salfi said. "We take sunlight, we take carbon dioxide, and we turn it into something that becomes a nutrient for industry."
Vodka or hand sanitizer?
But if we talk about purely marketing potential, then few of the finalists can compare with Air.
When Dr. Sheehan and Konstantin joined forces, they needed to expand their business. Over time, they built a 200 square meter manufacturing facility in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, which is full of artists and industrial estates. It took them almost two years to get the permits alone.
But something else was much more important. They had to prove that their vodka tasted good. At last year's high-end product competition, they submitted their vodka in a blind tasting session and received a gold medal. One taster said he liked the “slightly viscous” texture of the drink.
According to Konstantin, more than 60 New York establishments have signed contracts with them to purchase this vodka. Of course, the coronavirus pandemic has slowed everything down as bars, restaurants and shops have closed.
And Konstantin and Dr. Shihan have also stopped vodka production and are instead using the alcohol they produce to make hand sanitizer to help stop the coronavirus. Konstantin says they are planning to fill 1,600 containers in the near future. “We just ran out of raw materials now,” Konstantin explains the delay.
Christopher Flavelle