An Air-Sourced Heat Pump to Decarbonize Industrial Steam: A Brewery Case Study

Join us and our partners at Citizens Climate Education for the April Odell Pub Talk Series on addressing the climate crisis. We'll be joined by Professor Todd Bandhauer of AtmosZero who is tackling decarbonizing industrial heat and steam.

The combustion of fuel to generate steam for industry accounts for nearly 8% of global primary energy consumption, which yields >2 Gton CO2 emitted. More than 50% of all industrial steam is <200°C (<392°F), representing a significant opportunity for steam-generating industrial heat pumps. Waste heat-driven heat pumps can have a high COP, but their widespread adoption has suffered from high installation costs and operational downtime. An air-source heat pump can be installed without complex integration and, as a result, is an economical solution even with a reduced COP relative to waste heat-driven solutions. This talk presents a case study of an air-sourced steam-generating heat pump installed and operating at New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO. This is the highest lift heat pump ever reported in the open literature, generating steam at 150°C (302°F) with ambient temperatures as low as -13°C (9°F). Performance results and installation costs from the pilot show that waste heat-driven heat pumps require waste heat temperatures up to 90°C (194°F) to yield a payback relative to air-source heat pumps of less than 5 years.

Please feel free to arrive early for networking, as the presentation begins at 5:30 pm