If I add baking soda to lemon juice and water or use carbonated water is the carbon the same as the CO2 in the atmosphere?
If I add baking soda to lemon juice and water or use carbonated water is the carbon the same as the CO2 in the atmosphere?
I was thinking of making lemonade and was wondering if it would let CO2 into the atmosphere or not.
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Yes, except don't do this.
The reaction is
NaHCO3 + CH3COOH -> Na+ + CH3COO- + + H2O + CO2
If you know how to read those. Sure the CO2 is the same if you let the vessel pressurise but that sodium ion and ethanoate isn't! Sodium salts taste well very salty. It'll ruin the lemonade
edit: oh also if climate. If you burn a tonne of coal that's 3 tonnes of CO2 in what I like to call "nature's fume hood" (don't worry I'm sure it's consequence free). We currently burn about 15 billion tonnes of coal alone per year. When I carbonate a litre of water around 5 grams dissolves I think? so if we have every single person on earth a litre of fizzy water each day we would emit 120 million tonnes of co2 a year. Which is 1% of coal alone, which is less than half our emissions of CO2 for power alone, and co2 isn't the only factor in warming.
So even in the absolutely insane case of a planet of fizzy water addicts where even babies are chugging the stuff it wouldn't matter at all.
Good point Salty lemonade does not sound very nice.
Yeah I tried this once as a kid haha. You neutralise a bunch of the acid so it isn't crisp and sharp, instead it tastes like mildly lemon salt.
oh sorry brain fart, replace ethanoic acid with citric, same difference really it'll still be salty. I thought you meant adding vinegar and bicard like highschool science to make co2.
If you want though you can generate the co2 that way separately and pump the gas into the lemonade. That'll not ruin the flavour
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I appreciate all of this chemistry trivia ❤️
Edit my comment? Erase my mistake?
Tell me young one, can a man be unkilled? a lie untold? a promise unbroken?
Nay, I have done a fell thing and shall wear the stain of it forever.
I assumed you a chemist, what a blunder.
Clearly you're a warrior poet with a passion for chemistry.
I'm actually the shards of what was once a bad physicist who dropped out of a PhD because they're hard and I'm brittle.
I should've done chemistry though, firstly because it is cool and involves more than crying at your desk, secondly because I would actually have a job, thirdly because if I didn't have a job I could at least make some drugs to cope with the stress, and fourthly because if the government came for my coping drugs I could make bombs to throw at them till they left me alone.
Nice, I dropped out of a poli sci degree for very similar reasons.
On the bright side you don't need a PhD to produce drugs and bombs, and those things might help with the whole desk crying conundrum.
Actually adding (small amounts of) baking soda and an acid to drinks is a fairly well traveled (and old fashioned) means of carbonating them. The contribution of the Sodium to the taste of the drink usually isn't very high unless you're adding more than is needed for carbonation and can be overcome with the addition of a sweetener
Really? But to get decent carbonation you would need to add a lot. Like 15 grams or so because dissolution is not very efficient, most the co2 is going to pressurise the headspace
The amount required depends on the volume being carbonated. 1L of CO2 requires about 3.5 grams of Sodium bicarbonate which is about a teaspoon. I use Potassium bicarbonate (usually used in home brewing for controlling pH) instead because 1) it works just as well and 2) it boosts the amount of Potassium rather than Sodium in my diet. As for headspace, you only leave enough that the reaction doesnt cause the contents to splatter everywhere before you can recap the bottle. The contents should be sweet enough that it doesnt matter if theres a couple grams of a Sodium or Potassium salt mixed in which isnt hard to do if you use a reasonable amount of sweetener eg. table sugar, fruit juice, stevia etc.
Fair enough, I don't drink many sweet drinks and tried to carbonate soda water that way.
Re head space, you also need to make sure you're leaving enough when you open it. You're only very lightly carbonating with 3.5 g. Most soda water and softdrinks have a head pressure of around 70 psi, the bottles can actually spike to around 150 when dropped which is sort of terrifying. Without the addition of all the crap they add to slow nucleation bottles can erupt very merily when opened!
When making my own soda water (I just hook bottles up to a regulated stream of co2 and shake) I do actually add some but only about 1/8 of a teaspoon per litre.
Making things slightly salty makes them nice and I find it helps reduce some of the harsh acid taste the carboxylic acid. Also it seems to modify how the bubbles form which is interesting. Maybe a surface tension of water effect? I'm unsure there.
Tbh I usually dont let it sit long so the fact that it isnt as carbonated is less of an issue. That said, there is also fermented soda which uses wine yeast (you can use baking yeast but this is arguably less ideal) and sugar to generate the CO2 instead of a bicarbonate base and acid. This you can essentially let sit to carbonate as much as you want but like all common ferments, it does generate a small amount of alcohol and does require dechlorination of the water you use. It also needs sugar to work while soda stream and the soda/acid method dont care how sugary the soda is.