The carbon dioxide market is going through the roof right now.
Don’t believe us? Just check out these numbers.
In the United States alone, the demand for carbon dioxide reached 10.3 million tons per year in 2021, with a revenue of $2.75 billion. That domestic demand is projected to expand at an annual growth rate of 2% during the next five years. Globally, the demand is even more striking — valued at roughly $3.68 billion in 2021, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 7.3%.
Clearly, everyone wants to get their hands on CO2, and thankfully, there is no shortage of production. Rather than let CO2 float away into our atmosphere and impact global warming, carbon dioxide manufacturing companies domestically and all over the world have designed and implemented environmentally-friendly processes and systems to capture and sequester these emissions at the source so they can then be used later for secondary purposes that are cleaner and safer.
But who are the major players right now when it comes to rising CO2 demand?
4 Industries Driving Carbon Dioxide Demand
Carbon dioxide is the most well-known greenhouse gas. It is colorless and transparent to light in the air; more importantly, it is essential to maintaining our atmosphere’s protective blanket because it traps heat close to the earth. Without it, all the heat we receive from the Sun would escape back into space and make our environment inhospitably cold.
With that said, it’s also the biggest reason why we continue to experience the negative effects of climate change. By repurposing carbon dioxide, we reduce the threat of harmful emissions and redirect the gas toward helping make our world a better place.
- The Food Industry — CO2 is required in the food industry for a variety of reasons. This includes everything from chilling poultry, pork, and beef and freezing prepared foods to helping beverages and soft drinks taste good. CO2 is also important when it comes to drying to extend fruit and vegetable shelf-life, using ice and pellets for packaging and transporting food, and in the breweries and microbreweries industry. As a result, food applications comprise 70% of carbon dioxide demand in the United States.
- Industrial Use — Carbon dioxide is relied on heavily in gas shielding, metalworking, and municipal and industrial wastewater treatments. Other industrial CO2 uses you may not realize include fire extinguishers, inflating life rafts and life jackets, cold pellet blast cleaning, foaming rubber and plastics, and cement.
- Oil Field — The addition of CO2 increases the overall pressure of an oil reservoir, making it easier to extract oil from production wells. According to the Global Energy Institute, approximately 20 billion metric tons of C02 is used in enhanced oil recovery.
- Other — A fast-growing market for carbon dioxide usage is for cannabis. This is because cannabis plants need CO2 to make energy from light via photosynthesis.
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