This Martini Wants to Kill Climate Change One Sip at a Time

In 2017, Stafford Sheehan was a chemist working on artificial photosynthesis, coming up with metal-based catalysts that’d mimic the way living things acquire energy from the Sun. He did not expect to create a martini that could save the planet.

Sheehan had an invention, a box that could electrolyze a burst of carbon dioxide and a dose of water. Run all that over a metal catalyst to goose a biochemical reaction, and, presto: renewable fuel made from air. One of the fuels he was making was ethanol, C₂H₆O, a molecule you might also recognize as the thing that makes you drunk. “I had taken to purifying the ethanol that I pulled out of our little electrolyzer, and I made a few beverages out of it,” Sheehan says. “It was always kind of a joke. Me and the other scientists in the lab would be like, ‘Let’s distill some of this and drink it at the party tonight.’ It was like a gag.”

Then Sheehan met Greg Constantine, a music promoter working for Smirnoff—the vodka label, part of the transnational booze company Diageo. And Constantine didn’t think that joke was funny. No, no, no. What Constantine and Sheehan realized was that with some tweaks, they could take that ethanol output and turn it into something people would pay good money to drink: a high-end vodka that goes on sale today, called Air. A vodka whose manufacturing process also slurped planet-killing greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.

A lot of companies claim the stuff they sell also helps the environment. Sometimes it’s true; sometimes it’s greenwashing. Capitalists gonna capitalism. But if Air has done the molecular math right, this booze actually kills climate change—a little.

Air cofounder Stafford Sheehan introduces hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide gas into the company’s reactor.

Courtesy of Air Co.

Traditional alcoholic beverages are a miracle of evolutionary biology. Yeast, a fungus, eats certain sugars and excretes ethanol and carbon dioxide on the other end, plus a bunch of other aromatic molecules with their own flavor contributions. The sugar source determines the type of booze. Start with grapes, you get wine. Grains, you get beer. Rice, you get sake. And so on.

If you want to put some topspin on that, you throw in a 2,000-year-old technology called distilling, which pumps energy into that fermented stuff in the form of heat and separates the more volatile molecules (like ethanol) from the heavier ones. Distill wine, you get brandy. Distill beer, you get whisky. Sake, you get shochu. And so on again.

Or you could just … not? Instead of messing around with fruit substrates and yeast, Sheehan and Constantine realized, all they really needed was a CO₂ source—that could be hydrogen refining, the production of the antifreeze ingredient ethylene glycol, the production of plastic. Or even (and this was pretty slick) the waste CO₂ from other alcohol producers. “Why try to fight thermodynamics and pull it out of the air at 400 parts per million?” Sheehan says.

Run that CO₂ and some tap water through a new version of the electrolyzer and you get booze. Well, a solution of water and 20 to 25 percent ethanol, to be precise. To get it up to spirit potency, that goes into a still. “We distill it all the way to 96 percent,” Sheehan adds. That’s called the azeotropic limit, the highest percentage of alcohol in water a still can manage. Sheehan adds tasty water from upstate New York back in, to dilute it back to a typical 80 proof.

The US government defines vodka by regulation as “neutral spirits so distilled, or so treated after distillation with charcoal or other materials, as to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.” But that, of course, is nonsense. Ethanol itself has a taste, both bitter and sweet. But all the vodka you’ve ever tasted started by fermenting a sugar source—potatoes, goes the cliche, but usually these days some kind of grain.

So is Sheehan’s juice vodka? Shyeah. But not as we know it. It’s literally made from thin air.

“We have a power purchase agreement where we’re powered by renewable energy, and we have solar panels on top of the distillery too,” Sheehan says. That’s what runs the electric boilers that heat the bottom of the still. Air has partnered with a gas provider to deliver CO₂, and according to that company’s life cycle analysis it only takes 200 kg of CO₂ to deliver a metric ton of same. The company factored in a 10-year lifespan for the mostly steel still, and even bought offsets for the label printing. By Air’s math, the process of making a kilogram of ethanol actually removes 1.47 kg of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Since the 750 ml bottle you might buy (for $65) has 0.236 kg of ethanol in it, that’s about ¾ of a pound.

Me, a booze nerd: Carbon-negative vodka! You, a sophisticated connoisseur: Earth shmurth! How does it taste?

I ran a small, informal tasting in the WIRED office and found Air’s vodka to be sweet and slightly viscous, even at room temperature, with a sharp, almost isopropyl-like aroma. My colleagues used words like “medicinal” and “syrupy” to describe it. One also said that if it had botanicals in it and was a gin, she would like it.

Sheehan isn’t sure why folks taste sweetness, but he does a lot of analysis on his vodka before it gets into a bottle, and has a hypothesis. “When you’re building ethanol from CO₂, you’re sticking two carbon dioxides together rather than breaking down a six-carbon sugar,” Sheehan explains. That leads to a couple of unusual (he hastens to say safe! Perfectly safe!) carbon-based compounds that might account for the mouthfeel.

At least a few professionals are more psyched than my deskmates. An Air spokesperson says it’ll be available at a half-dozen high end New York restaurants and bars, and a couple of retail outlets. “I had the same feeling with this that I had when I first tried St. Germain [a popular elderflower liqueur], where I was like, ‘I just think it’s going to work.’” says Eddy Buckingham, co-owner of the Manhattan restaurant Chinese Tuxedo. “It’s a great product, and the backstory legitimizes the price point.” (Gramercy Tavern is still in the evaluation stage, a spokesperson tells me.)

The world of small-batch distilling has its own mores, though. It’s one thing to say booze can save the world, but if a supply chain includes tanks of liquified CO₂, is that still art? “The vodkas that are actually enjoyable are enjoyable because of their impurities, not their purity. It’s a great science project, but it’s soulless,” says Lance Winters, master distiller at St. George Spirits. “It’s the booze equivalent of a drum machine.”

Which, OK. Winters and other best-in-class distillers pride themselves on giving full flourish to the substrates they work with, showcasing the quality of their ingredients. That’s not really on the menu here. This is an ace chemist at work.

You can decide how you feel about that. But if you believe, along with basically every scientist, that human society is in a death race to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees, then you know that’ll require pulling 205 billion metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. My math is rough here, but that means something like 400 trillion liters of Air vodka, or roughly 50 quadrillion Air vodka martinis (depending on your preferred proportions of vodka to vermouth).

America, I think we can do it.