Steam is a powerful source of heat. In factories, it can be used to drive chemical reactions, power compressors, boil liquids, dye fabric, and more.
Salvi: “The beer that you drink to the products that you use, like toothpaste, to the clothes you wear, all of it, it’s touched by steam.”
Ashwin Salvi is with Atmos Zero, a company that’s working to reduce the climate impact of making steam.
To generate steam, most companies rely on boilers that run on fossil fuels like coal and gas, which emit a lot of planet-warming carbon pollution.
But Atmos Zero has developed a new industrial-strength heat pump boiler that uses electricity to pull heat out of the surrounding air and convert that heat into high-temperature steam.
Atmos Zero’s first commercial customer is the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado.
New Belgium plans to brew beer using the technology as soon as next year.
But the heat pumps could be used for much more than making beer.
Salvi says their design makes them easy to integrate into a wide range of manufacturing facilities.
Salvi: “With one product, we can standardize the way that we create steam for a wide variety of industries.”
So by making steam with electricity, this technology could reduce the carbon footprint of manufacturing.
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media
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