Most of the ammonia plants that feed the U.S. merchant CO₂ market schedule their major maintenance turnarounds in the spring. A turnaround pulls a plant offline for several weeks at a time. It lands just as beverage demand starts climbing toward its summer peak.
That timing is not something anyone designed. It is two calendars running against each other. Fertilizer economics decide when ammonia plants come down for service. Weather decides when breweries, soft drink bottlers, and food processors pull the most CO₂. The two peaks do not line up. Supply thins out at the same moment demand rises, and it happens with enough regularity that the industry has a name for it. The summer crunch.
Two Calendars That Do Not Match
Merchant CO₂ is a byproduct business. Almost none of it is produced for its own sake. Ammonia plants make it while making fertilizer. Ethanol plants make it while making fuel. A handful of natural wells produce it directly, but they are the exception. That means CO₂ availability is tied to the host plant's economics, not to what CO₂ buyers need in any given week.
Ammonia production is built around the planting season. Many plants run hard through the winter and early spring, then take scheduled maintenance once fertilizer demand eases. Ethanol output has its own rhythm tied to fuel markets and plant maintenance. Stack those service windows on top of each other and a large share of domestic CO₂ capacity can be down or reduced across the late spring and summer.
Now put beverage demand on the same chart. Carbonated drinks, beer, and packaged food all move faster in warm weather. The CO₂ that carbonates a soda, pushes a draft line, or blankets a food package is in its highest demand exactly when the plants that produce it are most likely to be offline.
Why It Shows Up as Cost, Not Just Scarcity
A tight market rarely means a buyer gets no CO₂. It means the CO₂ gets harder to secure, in ways that do not all appear on the invoice. Suppliers move regular customers onto allocation. Loads that used to come from a plant an hour away start coming from three states over. Freight climbs because the trucks and drivers are the real bottleneck once local supply is gone.
Then there is the cost that never lands on a purchase order at all. A filling line that slows because the next tanker is late. A batch that waits. A planner who spends a July afternoon deciding whether to ration product or call customers with a delay. Those hours are the most expensive part of a supply gap, and they stay invisible until the gap arrives.
Buyers who treat the summer squeeze as a surprise absorb it every year. Buyers who treat it as a known, recurring feature of the merchant market can plan around it. The difference is not luck. It is whether CO₂ is modeled as a stable commodity or as the seasonal input it actually is.
Beverage Grade Feels the Squeeze First
When supply tightens, not all CO₂ is equal. Lower specification industrial gas may still be moving while qualified beverage grade product is already on allocation. A bottler or a brewer cannot substitute. The gas touches the finished drink. It has to meet the specification and it has to be documented, every load, no exceptions.
That is why food and beverage buyers often feel the crunch first and hardest. Their usable pool of supply is smaller to begin with. A source that produces a large volume of CO₂ but cannot consistently hit beverage grade does not help them when the market is tight. It only adds another step to a chain that is already under stress. Qualified volume is the only volume that counts for these buyers.
A Source That Does Not Follow the Fertilizer Calendar
The structural fix is not to squeeze more out of the same plants. It is to add supply that runs on a different clock. Renewable natural gas upgraders are a good example. They separate CO₂ from raw biogas while cleaning methane to pipeline quality, and they run on the economics of renewable fuel, not fertilizer. Their CO₂ byproduct does not disappear because it is turnaround season at an ammonia plant.
That CO₂ is usually vented today. Captured and purified, it becomes regional beverage grade supply from a source that was already operating. At our Lewiston, North Carolina facility, CleanCycleCarbon captures CO₂ from the back end of an RNG upgrader and purifies it to beverage grade using a patent pending cryogenic process built for the contaminant profile that comes with biogas. The point is not only that the source is cleaner. It is that the source is available on a different schedule than most of the market.
A distributed set of these sources changes the seasonal math. More regional production means shorter freight lanes and fewer long hauls when a legacy plant goes down for service. It does not replace the distributors, tanks, drivers, and testing routines the industry already runs on. It works with them, and it gives them another option in the months when options are scarce.
The Planning Question for Buyers
For a food or beverage producer, the useful question is not just who has the lowest quote in April. It is where the CO₂ comes from and whether that source is exposed to the same seasonal calendar as everyone else's. If every load a buyer relies on traces back to plants that all take maintenance in the same window, the buyer is carrying a concentration risk that shows up every summer.
Reducing that risk looks a lot like diversifying any other critical input. Know the source. Know what it depends on. Know whether it can hold beverage grade under stress. And build in at least one option that does not go quiet the moment fertilizer season ends. That is not a hedge against a rare event. It is planning for something that arrives on schedule, every year.
The summer crunch is not a shortage story. It is a design feature of a supply chain that leans on a small number of seasonal byproduct sources. Beverage grade CO₂ from new, distributed sources will not erase the calendar. It will give buyers a way to stop being surprised by it.
