CO2 shortage: Lessons learned from a storm in a pint glass? | Hacker News Reader

CO2 shortage: Lessons learned from a storm in a pint glass?

gasworld.com

77 pointssndean92 comments

A better article about from an industry insider is https://www.gasworld.com/co2-shortage-lessons-learned/201500...

An interesting fact that he picks out is that coordinating shutdown periods between suppliers would be in breach of anti-competition rules.

The crisis has overall highlighted the fact that shared production can cause issues. Ammonia is worth about $50 billion whereas CO2 is worth about $7 billion worldwide. This makes the CO2 market about 7 times more inelastic in supply than ammonia.

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/europes-.... Who can resist Gasworld magazine?

Besides this comment, is there a more transparent way to see when mods have mutated the post?

I find the gasworld article hard to read in comparison to the atlantic one. Three paragraphs in, and it still doesn't say anything, it just jumps from one subject to another without touching the main issue.

>...that coordinating shutdown periods between suppliers would be in breach of anti-competition rules.

Is this likely to be true? My, perhaps limited, understanding is that collusion is only evidence of illegal anti-competitive behaviour and is not illegal in itself...

Its a slightly grey area. This would be seen as illegal because it is an "agreement" to "limit or control production" which is prohibited by EU law article 101(1). However article 101(3) allows these agreements if it "contributes to improving the production or distribution of goods" and "allow consumers a fair share of the resulting benefit".

In a case in Australia [1] LNG producers had to apply to the government in order to coordinate shutdowns. The regulator concluded that they could approve this on the basis that there it was "likely to result in a public benefit" and that "reducing competition in the acquisition of maintenance services is unlikely to be significant" [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-lng-regulator/aust...

[2] https://www.accc.gov.au/public-registers/authorisations-and-...

OK, but it's an agreement to make sure that production never gets too limited. That may be to "control production", but it sure isn't to "limit" it.

You could also see it as limiting (and controlling) the production of plant maintenance work.

For an example of why this is anti-competitive imagine there are 4 producers A, B, C and D. A, B and C agree that they will co-ordinate shutdowns such that they are shut down for four months of the year each. D is not party to this agreement so must shutdown at a time when one of the other producers is shutdown. During this time their are only 2 producers online meaning increased prices and a net benefit to A, B and C whilst the cost of getting maintenance engineers will also increase because they are working simultaneously with either A, B or C which is a net loss to D.

> However article 101(3) allows these agreements if it "contributes to improving the production or distribution of goods" and "allow consumers a fair share of the resulting benefit".

Isn't this clearly the case here?

I would say clearly yes.

According to the FTC [1], price fixing is almost always illegal. From the link: "An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price."

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

edit: Forgot this is about Europe. Relevant EU page: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/sell-abroad/free-compe...

I asked an expert in the beer trade about this recently and some of the big breweries (Molson Coors who make UK bestseller Carling, for instance) make their own CO2 for supply chain security.

Technical details of this plant can be found at https://foodandbeverage.pentair.com/~/media/websites/food-an...

This is possible because Molson Coors has the largest brewery in the UK and can brew CO2 producing ales and CO2 consuming lagers on the same site. For other brewers this investment wouldn't be economical.

Fermentation produces huge amounts of CO2 and some breweries collect it and sell it as a byproduct

Large scale breweries are CO2 consumers not producers small scale production with natural carboninzation can potentially produce CO2 but the majority of it is produced form lime stone and other minerals afaik.

I’m not aware of any breweries actually collecting it for sale the amounts produced will be so minute and the collection process will be so expensive that it can’t make financial sense.

It's done regularly in Europe

https://www.automationworld.com/beer-brewing-and-carbon-diox...

https://books.google.nl/books?id=0os_gIvG_ccC&pg=PA349&lpg=P...

https://foodandbeverage.pentair.com/en/products/haffmans-co2...

Reading a bit into this and it looks like they are doing it because of emissions regulation, overall EU breweries are one of the largest consumers of CO2 in the food and drink industry.

German regulations ("Reinheitsgebot") explicitly forbid adding CO2. So pretty much every major brewery in Germany does not add CO2 into their product. They do use CO2 and other gasses to pressurize casks, however.

Reinheitsgebot isn’t mandatory and covers only Bavaria afaik if you don’t follow those rules you can’t use the trademark on the label but you can sell beer the vast majority of beer in Germany is not carbonated trough secondary fermentation.

Some may be like Faxe in Denmark, which uses the CO₂ gained from brewing beer to make soft drinks.

(As I read somewhere a week or two ago.)

Some fuel ethanol breweries collect and sale their CO2 byproducts. The article mentions them (but notes they are not a significant source). IIRC the small fuel ethanol plants in the US collect and sell their CO2, but the large ones do not - this is a factor of age, the small plants came first, but they time anyone was building big plants the CO2 market in the US didn't have room/need for any more suppliers.

Ethanol makes more sense since they produce at a much larger scale but beer breweries don’t.

I thought beer was naturally carbonated! Not being a drinker, I never gave it much thought.

It often is -- when yeast ferments a substance, it releases CO2. During the fermentation of beer (or again most anything, but I'll just use beer as a shorthand), that CO2 is released through an airlock. When the beer is bottled, any beer made in large quantities will be sterilized first with potassium metabisulfite (I think) so that fermentation doesn't continue in the can, bottle, or keg.

If you don't kill the yeast, or if you bottle your beer with an extra batch of yeast (called bottling yeast) and sugar, you'll get fermentation continuing in the bottle, which will result in the CO2 produced being absorbed into the liquid. Obviously this is not as precise and will create different flavors and mouthfeel as a beer ages.

If you do kill the yeast but still want fizz, you just force carb your beer with CO2 from a container.

Depends what kind. Real ale contains yeast is naturally carbonated as it continues to ferment in the cask or bottle. In keg beer, after fermentation the yeast is filtered from it, the beer is pasteurized, and CO2 is added.

Real ale is an arbitrary definition large scale commercial brewing will not risk secondary bottle fermentation for many reasons from quality control to health and safety.

>Real ale is an arbitrary definition

In the same sense that any term has an arbitrary definition. The Campaign for Real Ale coined the term to defend the practice of cask and bottle conditioning of beer. Beer is only real ale if it's unfiltered, unpasteurised and is served without additional carbonation.

There are plenty of breweries producing real ale on a large scale; many of them are subsidiaries of AB InBev, the world's largest brewing business. Filtered and/or pasteurised beer is more convenient to ship, but other food and drink manufacturers cope just fine with perishable products.

My point was that by definition it's naturally carbonated and all other beer isn't. Cask conditioned ale is common throughout the UK and bottle conditioned ales are common in Belgium and elsewhere. (They're also usually higher rated than mass-produced beer but that wasn't the point I was making.)

There are some large scale brewers doing it. Duvel alone apparently do 140 million litres a year.

At least nitrogen powered Guinness draught is safe.

Guinness is usually 25/75 (CO2/N2).

Not mentioned here but relative cost of transport is an issue for CO2 - It’s pretty cheap on a nominal basis ($/CF) so transport becomes an issue. Which means it’s a local market, also since it’s a small market - transportation infrastructure hasn’t been built for it.

Point being there is no shortage of CO2 - just a shortage in certain places of demand (at non-exhorbinant pricing).

I hadn't quite caught that the manufacture of fertilizer is so carbon-heavy -- it's not just the energy sunk into cracking apart N2, but the H is also coming from fossil fuels. -.-

The amount of foam in that beer makes me uncomfortable.

Don't go to the Yebisu brewery in Tokyo then - they pour a demonstration glass for you and let you watch as the head extrudes itself several inches past the top of the glass, like Arsenio Hall's haircut.

But does it make the sound the audience used to make on his show?

Welcome to Schweizerhaus (https://www.schweizerhaus.at)

Why don't more people put their beers on nitro? A few local breweries have nitro IPAs which are freaking delicious.

Beers on "nitro" are still carbonated with CO2. The nitro is used to achieve a higher serving pressure used to force it through a diffusing nozzle on the tap. N2 doesn't actually dissolve in liquid very easily compared to CO2. If you put the CO2 at higher pressure, it makes the beer more carbonated over time.

It might be nice but it's a completely different product and not desirable for many styles.

CO2 increases acidity, changing the taste. Nitrogen doesn't do this.

See "chemistry" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonated_water

On the note of nitro craft beers, more often than not I find that nitro tap beers are a gimmick and that the beer would be better served be being conventionally carbonated.

It's the same story with cask ales. Some styles really don't work well on a handpull.

> It’s used to stun animals before slaughter

What? How? Carbon dioxide is well known to cause a painful death. Why the fuck are they not using nitrogen?

Because it's significantly easier to engineer a system using carbon dioxide than one using nitrogen. This is because carbon dioxide is heavier than air such that the system doesn't need to be enclosed. With nitrogen you need sealed chambers which are more expensive and the process will take longer.

I think this is poorly written in the article... Likely the Co2 gas is used to power bolt-guns which are in turn used to stun larger animals like cows before slaughter.

No, the slaughter industry does in fact use CO2 to asphyxiate animals. It even has a fun euphemism, "Controlled Atmosphere Stunning".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Animal_...

Interesting, I didn't realize that was done at scale... As the comment above me said, seems harsh to use CO2 for that...

I didn't know about this. This is outrageous. I don't care that animals are being raised for slaughter – our ancestors would chase and spear animals and that was likely to be very stressful and painful. We can do better today. To actually make animals feel that they are suffocating is beyond inhumane. Even carbon monoxide would be better.

We (humans and other animals) are specifically engineered to detect CO2 and trigger the suffocation response, and no other gas. Then the idiots will use exactly the only gas that causes suffering.

Is it possible to figure out which companies are doing this?

CO or N would be completely painless. CO is often called the "silent killer" as many humans die from it every year. Doesn't need to be pure CO or anything. Nitrogen would need to be pure but is similarly silent and painless. There is a video online of a pig lured into a nitrogen filled chamber by food. He loses consciousness, recovers, and goes straight back to the food like nothing has happened.

As for CO_2, I recommend trying to breathe the gas at the top of bottle of pop without wanting to violently withdraw from the pain.

Because it's cheaper. The slaughter industry really doesn't prioritize animal comfort.

When I started reading this article I thought it was a work of fiction, imagining a world in which there's a CO2 shortage rather than the famous over abundance which we're currently all aware of. It's odd and sad that there is a demand for the manufacture of carbon dioxide in a world absolutely choking on the excess of it.

It's like saying that you have access to several tons of gold because you live on the beach. Sure, there's plenty of gold in the ocean. But you can't do anything with it.

Exactly, to quote the (current) article,

>The caveat to this point, of course, is that this is also not as simplistic or straightforward as it might seem – despite the widespread perception, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is actually very minimal. In fact, it can be pegged at around 500 parts-per-million (ppm), which is less than 0.05%.

It's more than enough to cause problems without being trivial to take out and concentrate. Water may very well have enough lead in to damage someone's health without having enough to be economically beneficial to extract for the material alone.

all good points. I take it back.

> Bioethanol and chemical factories, for example, also produce carbon dioxide as a by-product.

You know what that means. Indirectly we drink that tasty cow fart. I hope they clean the filters.

Do you know what milk and meat are made of?

I'm vegan for a reason.

The plants you eat are also indirectly made of your cow farts, though. And much more than just the farts.

Life is basically consuming cow and dinosaur farts and some of their rotted poo.

Disheartening, but now I know. Enlightenment hits me in the form of a cow patty

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

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