CO2 Usage in an Old Application, With a New Twist in an Ever-Growing Spiked Beverage Market

New markets are opening, and competition is heating up over carbonating more than the traditional Coca–Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper – Snapple, and many private labels of purely soft drinks. The rise, and rapid growth of hard seltzers is impressive. The merchant CO2 industry prides itself on developing new and unique applications for the product. Over the last decade or so, uses including CO2 ‘blast cleaning’ appeared, which uses small rice-sized dry ice under pressure to clean surfaces from precision electronics, to ship hulls. Other newer applications include strengthening concrete and sequestering CO2 within the application of CO2 into concrete – thus enhancing the strength and calcium carbonate content. With the spotlight on a growing cannabis industry, both enhanced photosynthesis in greenhouses and on the vine use CO2; and the use of CO2 under pressure for supercritical extraction of CBD oil are growing. All of which is relevant to specialty drinks often carbonated, along with CBD oil.

On the subject of beverage carbonation, this use is old, dating back to the early Coca-Cola days and remaining critical in the production of carbonated soft drinks. The use of CO2 in soft drink and beer carbonation has been flat to a modest growth for some years; which represents an important, but smaller portion of the overall CO2 merchant market…