Going Carbon-Negative—Starting with Vodka

In 2014, two Google engineers, writing in the pages of IEEE Spectrum, noted that “if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

One alternative is to stuff carbon dioxide underground. People have been talking about this for well over a decade. But just look at Exxon-Mobil’s website and see how much progress hasn’t been made. In 2015, a bunch of mostly Canadian energy producers decided on a different route. They funded what came to be called the Carbon XPRIZE to turn “CO2 molecules into products with higher added value.”

One of the more unlikely finalists emerged from the hipsterish Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. Their solution to climate change: vodka. The startup, the Air Company, takes liquified CO2 and distills it into ethanol, and then fine-tunes it into vodka. The resulting product is not only carbon-neutral but carbon negative.