I just saw a post on Facebook about a supermarket whose shelves are low on pops and carbonated waters because of a CO² shortage. What’s to stop people from pulling CO² from the air and cleaning it of impurities to use it in the drink manufacturing process?
In: Chemistry
It’s because it’s cheaper. It takes energy to pull it out of the air. The Co2 they’re using is apparently a byproduct of ammonia production, so of course making it that way it’s essentially a waste product and way way way cheaper.
What’s to stop people is mainly the expense. The equipmemt you need to liquefy air and then separate it into its components is pretty pricey and complex.
What you’re suggesting is called a CO2 scrubber, and is an **outrageously** expensive piece of technology that pretty much only sees use in industrial filtering applications and airtight environments such as spacecrafts and submarines.
Pulling CO2 out of our atmosphere for something as trivial as fizzy drinks when there are many chemical processes that generate a ton of CO2 just as a byproduct does not make economic sense for anyone.
despite what you infer from the news, there isnt really THAT much CO^2 in the atmosphere, it only makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere (up from the 0.02% it should be which is causing a lot of problems). To carbonate 1 litter of soda, you would perfectly have to extract all of (and only) the CO^2 in a cube 2 meters across.
we dont have the technology to do that without chilling the entire cube down to -57°c. cooling things es expensive, expecialy when there are so many chemicals you can mix together to directlt make CO^2.
the answer to most “what prevents people from doing ____?” is money. if it was cost effective, CO2 capture could be scaled in the next few years. but the economics aren’t there and corporations don’t make decisions based on morals
Capturing a tonne of CO2 from the air costs somewhere around $500-1000, although people hope to drop that to around $200 in the future. Cleaning it from other stuff not yet included. Getting it as waste product from other industrial processes is basically free, and the infrastructure for that exists already while the air capture stations would have to be built first. There are only a few research projects at the moment.
Adding atmospheric CO2 to my soda would put it back in the atmosphere when I open the can and pour it out.
Onlu 9.2 % of the atmosphere is co2, that means wasting energy to pump the other 99.8% through your machinery to gather the co2
We aren’t going to “run out” of carbon dioxide. In the grand scheme of things, it is extremely abundant.
The issue is that there is a certain grade of CO2 which is suitable for use in food and beverages. There are strict rules as to what impurities may be present and how much.
If there is a hiccup in the supply chain for beverage-grade CO2, scrubbing the air would be a last resort. There are probably dozens of other ways to do it. But the bottling plant has to make a decision. If they think the shortage is temporary then they may just wait it out but with costs going up in the short term. If they think the shortage is permanent, then they have to develop a new supply chain and/or retool the factory which means higher costs in the short term.
As others have said, it’s REALLY expensive, but we are going to probably have to start doing it at some point. If we just didn’t do anything from a carbon reduction standpoint and wanted to capture all of the CO2 we put out globally right now, the bill would be in the $5T/year range.
Latest Answers