Carbon dioxide production in the US has been relatively static for the past ten years and will need to add capacity more quickly in the next five years to meet the growth in demand – but there is lots of potential to deliver that uplift.
The assessment comes from Maura Garvey, President of Intelligas Consulting, who was presenting to a packed conference on the first morning of speaker sessions at gasworld’s North American CO2 Summit 2024 in Nashville.
“New CO2 sources are added every year – but some sources are also lost; overall there has still been very little extra supply added in the past decade,” said Garvey. “Demand has been up by an average of 0.8% per annum in the past ten years but I am projecting 2% demand growth in the next five years – and that would require the equivalent of five 300 tons-per-day plants to come onstream in that period, before you even stop to consider what lost capacity might also need to be matched, in a world targeting Net Zero and beginning to sequester CO2.”
Garvey said the main driver for demand growth in the market was coming from dry ice, with the use of dry ice for blast-cleaning being the application seeing the fastest uplift. She said the US has 130 dry ice production locations today, owned by a mix of the industrial gas majors and some large independents. She said dry ice accounted for 18% of the liquid CO2 that is consumed in the US, after growing at about 5% a year for about a decade.
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