UK consultation on carbon dioxide supply resilience closes tomorrow
The UK government’s call for evidence on strengthening the resilience of the domestic carbon dioxide supply chain closes at 23:59 on 20 August, ending a 10-week consultation prompted by repeated market failures that have required state intervention three times in eight years.
The exercise, opened on 11 June, is intended to inform measures improving the resilience, security and sustainability of the UK’s supply of food and medical grade carbon dioxide across sectors classed as critical national infrastructure. Government documentation states plainly that the UK carbon dioxide industry lacks resilience and has been subject to repeated market failures in 2018, 2021 and 2026, each requiring intervention.
The structural problem is that most merchant carbon dioxide in Britain arrives as a by-product of ammonia and fertiliser production, leaving supply hostage to conditions in an unrelated market. Demand from food and beverage producers peaks in summer, precisely when ammonia and bioethanol plants scale back for maintenance having already served winter fertiliser and fuel demand. When gas prices rise, ammonia production becomes uneconomic and carbon dioxide output falls with it.
The most recent intervention came on 26 March, when the government directed Ensus UK to restart production at its mothballed Wilton bioethanol plant on Teesside, generating a significant volume of carbon dioxide for food manufacture, beverages, energy and healthcare. The plant had ceased production in autumn 2025 and was set to close permanently. Ministers earmarked around £100 million for an initial three-month run, subject to regular review, with associated spending to be reported in the Department for Business and Trade’s accounts. A standby arrangement requires Ensus to maintain the plant in a quiescent state at modest cost, ready for activation at short notice should a shortage or credible risk of one emerge. The trigger was disruption to European fertiliser production combined with rising gas prices linked to the Iran conflict and unplanned maintenance at several European producing sites.
The consultation asks industry, trade associations, consumer groups and academia for evidence on market-led options to diversify supply, boost lower-carbon sources and improve transparency across the value chain. Government documentation states the UK’s pathway to net zero requires a shift away from fossil-derived by-product carbon dioxide toward lower-carbon sources including biogenic capture and direct air capture, naming breweries and anaerobic digestion among more sustainable options.
That framing places the exercise at an unusual intersection. Carbon capture for permanent storage is explicitly excluded from scope, as is carbon dioxide sequestered in building materials or used for alternative fuels including sustainable aviation fuel. The consultation concerns carbon dioxide as an industrial commodity for resale and use, not as a waste stream for disposal. Yet the two markets increasingly compete: incentives for permanent removal draw captured carbon dioxide toward geological storage and away from merchant supply, while direct air capture inverts the traditional relationship by making carbon dioxide the primary output rather than a by-product.
The scale of the underlying contraction is significant. One of the UK’s largest carbon dioxide sources announced closure in 2025, cutting roughly 30% of domestic commodity supply, with some estimates suggesting merchant supply could fall by a third over the next decade against demand growing at around 2% annually.
Carbon dioxide supports meat and poultry processing, modified-atmosphere packaging, carbonation, refrigeration, water treatment, medical imaging and surgery, and civil nuclear operations. Industry confidence in European supply security fell 8% between October 2025 and February 2026, and further after the Iran crisis, standing at 26% against concern levels of 40% by early April.
Responses are invited through an online survey, with the department encouraging organisational respondents to use that route.
