How Pipeline Organics are turning Castle Rock's brewery waste into electricity

If you had to explain what Pipeline Organics does to someone in a pub, how would you put it? 

Imagine you’re a brewer and you make beer. For every pint of beer, you have to make 5 pints of waste, and you need to pay the sewage companies for that waste. Also, you use a lot of electricity and heat! Now, imagine you had a metal box sitting outside your brewery, and it removes almost all of your waste, powers itself, and gives you back some power. Would you use that if you were a brewer? Or if you ran a dairy, juice, cider, wine or whiskey company?

What's your own background prior to this? How does someone end up building fuel cells out of brewery waste?

I was a molecular microbiologist. Working on the antimicrobial resistance crisis. I have experience engineering proteins and understand bacteria. I turned to the Dark Side with project management qualifications that are now going to an MBA, though. Keyvan is a chemical engineer who worked on biofuel cells specifically for over 7 years. He used to make iron/gold cells that eat sugar from human blood and power your medical implants or sensors – much safer than a battery near your pacemaker, right? Anyway, he’s the tech brains and was always a scientist. We saw a potential to translate his tech to food and beverage manufacturing.

What there any particular "lightbulb moment" that led to the creation of Pipeline Organics? 

My cofounder Keyvan and I met at a University of Nottingham business competition called YES20. We won it, formed a team and did other competitions that led to our first grant and starting the business. But I guess the lightbulb moment was, we were trying to make an “environmental” product that took an existing product and engineered it give back financial and environmental value. Our first idea was “barbells with a dynamo that power your TV” because we’re both gym lovers (spoiler alert – didn’t work). We explored other ideas, and saw how much of an issue water management in industry is and we thought “wait, why can’t we just make Keyvan’s cells bigger, to solve this?”. The running joke is our motivation was that we are a bit too fond of drinking beer, but in reality brewery just has a really big problem and has low technical barriers to entry, so we’re building fuel cells for brewers now! I also wouldn’t mind having proper independent brews being cheaper and easier to get than the mass-market stuff.

Tell us about the Pipeline Organics team. You’re the CEO and Co-Founder, but who else is out there working for you and what are their roles? 

Our main guy is Keyvan Jodeiri. He’s a published expert in biofuel cells, with a PhD in the topic. He is the cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer, overseeing our scientific and development strategy. We are supported by two really big honchos called Gene Lewis – employee zero at Ceres Power – a fuel cell company now worth over £600m – and serial founder of several fuel cell and battery companies, with the scar tissue to match. He’s seen it all. We’re also advised by Prof. Bruce Logan, who is the guy who wrote the book on Microbial Fuel Cells. Enough said.

Tell us about the work you have been doing with Castle Rock. What have you learned from this? What have Castle Rock gained from it?

Castle Rock is a critical partner. They act as a real-world testbed for our technology, because the process is: 1. We build something in the lab; 2. We check it with the Food Innovation Centre at University of Nottingham and 3. We test it onsite with Castle Rock Brewery. They will be our installation site for our first deployment. Castle Rock themselves have gotten a pretty hard rustling of all their water and electricity bills, but also a business case that could save them a lot of money over the next 20 years. This will make them more competitive and resilient financially while highlighting their commitment to sustainability. Our learnings were around onsite operations – most of our engineering isn’t “make the tech better” but “make it work around what your customer already does”.

The brewery industry has been quite hard-hit financially over the last decade. But you seem confident that this technology will end up saving breweries money, as well as helping them be more environmentally sustainable. Please can you unpack that a little?

Certainly. The reality is that food and beverage margins are hard-hit by bills, but they don’t need to be. The way the UK does water treatment is a bit antiquated. And all of the organics in brewing waste have potential energy that is, well, going to waste! The way we’ll save food and drinks businesses money is simple – we give them turnkey containers that treat wastewater on site, through bacteria that literally eat the waste. They also convert it to electricity. Customers benefit because they don’t have to pay for the hardware upfront – we’ll have that covered with the banks under invoice financing agreements. Some of our early units will also be backed by grants, further reducing customer-facing costs. Brewers and other F&B manufacturers would just lease fuel cell containers from us long-term. So if we saved you 53% of your bills, we might charge you half of that saving as your lease – you still save big!

Nottingham seems to be quite cutting-edge in green tech - with a notoriously environment-focused transport system and a citywide Carbon Neutral 2028 pledge. Do you feel that’s the case? And if so has launching this company here bought you any advantages? 

We absolutely feel that’s the case – we have worked with many companies in the space that are about a more sustainable business environment and “greener” communities. Founding here has given us loads of advantages in terms of intellectual resources and sustainability-focused customers. We gain tremendous amounts of knowledge from the Food Innovation Centre, which is run by ex-Molson Coors execs. And a lot of the local businesses are very interested in improving their ESG performance as long as the business case makes sense.

You’re focused on breweries right now, but what’s the bigger picture? Down the line will you move into other sectors like spirits, soft drinks, dairies etc?
Yes. Our core technology is designed to work with any liquid waste. The way we build it allows us to rapidly adapt and test across waste streams, and we use the customers’ own onsite bacteria in the containers. We looked at beer because it’s very easy to get into financially, technologically and organisationally – most of the time you meet the MD/Founder directly. But our long-term plan is to expands into spirits, soft drinks, dairy, and consider other environments like textiles and sugar as well.

What's been the hardest part of building hardware (rather than software) as a small company?
I suppose, at the scale we are building, the biggest issue is how expensive R&D programmes are. If you’re doing software, you can get a paying customer almost immediately. With hardware, if it’s new, you need to develop it, then test it, then get paid commitment from a customer, then run it onsite for months, then prove it several more times for bankers to trust it enough to back fleets of your hardware. You also need to think about manufacturing and distribution, and convince investors that you will generate revenue without the Day 1 proof you typically get in software. We are confident that we can do it, but it has been challenging to secure the funds that allow us to run multi-year “hardware proof projects”. 

Where do you want the company to be in five years?
Ideally, deploying a fleet of 2,600+ containers across the UK and EU, and maybe Canada, the US and Asia. The way we build it makes it extraordinarily scalable and easy to distribute as long as there are large 3D printers nearby. That’s really our only major constraint. It’s also quite easy to maintain. We would like the Company to have a completely optimised technology and asset holdings that then make us attractive to the large incumbents like Veolia, Xylem or Suez. We would also love to work with the larger beer multinationals, because they tend to buy and provide capital to smaller brewers. In our dream future, most of our industry has a Pipeline Organics container onsite!

What's your go-to pint, at the end of the day?
A porter or a stout, without a trace of doubt. I absolutely love darker beers, and stouts and porters are often thick, creamy and chocolatey – which I love. A really good few I tried recently – local, of course – were Castle Rock’s “Fit to Fly”, as well as Blue Monkey’s Chocolate Orange Stout and Chocolate Amaretto Porter, as well as Lincoln Green’s “Tuck”. 

Anything else you want to say? 
Yes – we will need a significant amount of resources and momentum to fulfil our dreams. We’ll make industry cleaner – but you need to get in the saddle with us. So if you’re cleantech, watertech or foodtech investors, reach out! And if you’re brewers, we’re launching our full containers next year (2027). We would love to start building for you – and if you express interest, that’s a stronger argument for our financial instruments to help us build big fleets earlier on. Clean water. Onsite energy. Lower costs. If you believe in our mission, drop me a line and let’s start a conversation!

Find out more about Pipeline Organics