On one hand, carbon dioxide (CO2) is often mentioned in the press as the most abundant greenhouse gas, now in excess of 400 ppm (parts-per-million), according to most measurements, and a serious threat to global warming and a major contributor to climate change.
On the other hand, there have been rather severe shortages in various world merchant markets, primarily due to a lack of by-product carbon dioxide from (sometimes) anhydrous ammonia production, which is a common raw feedstock for many CO2 liquefaction/purification plants. The reasons for such outages are annual turnarounds of the source plants, reduced source plant operating schedules (due to shorter farming seasons), and natural gas feedstock problems for the ammonia plants, as one troubled source type.
There are also a host of mechanical problems and maintenance schedules, for various source plants, such as ethanol plants in some global markets, which seem to occur all at the same time – which coincidentally leads to dire shortages in these markets. To put this in context, with the dire shortage of CO2 for traditional uses such as soft drink and beer carbonation, meat processing, and a host of other uses, one could feel that since there is so much CO2 in excess everywhere, and ever more being vented to the atmosphere all the time (such as with Trump’s love of coal), how can we not have the commodity available for our daily traditional needs, such as beverage carbonation?
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