Heineken UK has announced a £25 million investment into its Manchester brewery to install heat pumps.
The total investment, which includes a £3.7 million grant from the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, will be used to install technology to capture heat from various sources, including the refrigeration units on site, and to then redistribute and reuse this excess heat to power other brewing stages, such as mashing and pasteurisation and to wash the returnable kegs.
The technology is a major step forward in the brewery’s mission to reduce its carbon emissions as, until now, gas has been used to generate the heat needed for certain parts of the brewing process. Once completed, it is estimated the installation will result in a circa 45% reduction in gas use at the site, leading to a reduction of carbon emissions.
Boudewijn Haarsma, Managing Director, said:
We’ve been around for 150 years and if we want to be here in another 150 years, we need to act now to deliver on our sustainability ambitions. In short, we want to brew a better world.
This announcement is hugely positive and represents a sizeable inward investment from HEINEKEN into UK decarbonisation. It builds on our wider company-wide efforts to reduce our emissions as we continue to work towards our global ambitions to reach net zero across our production sites (scope 1 and 2) by 2030. We will not get there alone, we know collaboration with partners will be key.
There’s been a brewery at this site for well over 100 years, and we’ve been proudly brewing in Manchester for fifteen years. With the city of Manchester’s ambition to reach net zero by 2038, we want to play our part in this journey for the city and its people, and to share the learnings we gather along the way.
The £25m investment into the brewery will significantly reduce reliance on gas through the installation of heat pumps, powered by renewably sourced electricity, retrieving and distributing heat through an interconnected heat network across the site, from brewing to packaging. By introducing this circular process, waste heat is redistributed from the brewing process to replace the thermal energy previously generated from burning fossil fuels. The second phase of the brewery’s journey to reduce its carbon emissions will be the decarbonisation of the Brewhouse which is scheduled to take place in 2024. The third and final stage will require the site to use additional alternative renewable energy, which work is underway to identify.
