An Iconic Brewery is Installing a Giant Heat Pump to Clean Up Its Emissions

By Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) —

Fort Collins is a relatively small town and with a wizard’s beard, Andrew Collins is pretty easy to spot. Officially, he’s the carbon neutral engineer at New Belgium Brewing, a craft beer startup gone national. Unofficially, he’s “the climate guy” and is often cornered with ideas on how to save the planet — most of them relatively half-baked.

“Usually it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me,” Collins admits. But three years ago, a New Belgium colleague was chatting with a fellow dad at a kids’ soccer game and fielded a casual pitch: an electric boiler made by AtmosZero, a startup headquartered just down the road from the brewery.

Boilers, which heat water to create steam, are a big deal in brewing and many other industrial processes, for that matter. To date, they almost all run on fossil fuels to generate steam that is piped for a wide range of end-uses, from heating to sterilizing.

“I tried to trip them up on all the thermodynamics,” Collins recalls from his first meeting with the AtmosZero team, “but they answered all my questions correctly. I really liked what I heard.”

Sometime in early May, the company’s first product, essentially an industrial-sized heat pump, will be bolted to the floor at New Belgium, supplanting one of the brewery’s three boilers that spew carbon into the Colorado skies.

“We could just put one of these at any of our four breweries,” Collins said.

‘Any place biology is involved’

Steam, it turns out, is a carbon gusher both massive and persistent. The world is full of industrial boilers squatting over some form of fire and belching steam up into a system of pipes. The biggest steam hogs are food, beverage, paper, pharmaceutical and biochemical plants, which use heat to help catalyze chemical reactions and keep complex machinery clean.

“There are a lot of boilers any place biology is involved,” says Addison Stark, CEO and cofounder of AtmosZero, which was recognized as a BloombergNEF Pioneer award winner this week.

Often the steam is nothing more complicated than a form of heat. College campuses and big apartment buildings generally have big boilers piping steam around to dozens of disseminated residential units.

All told, industrial boilers gobble up about 8% of the world’s primary energy and spew 2.25 gigatons of greenhouse gases a year, that’s roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of 600 coal-burning power plants. What’s more, hundreds of these units are churning away in US counties that have blown past air pollution limits.

Stark, who has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fastened on these figures during Covid-19 lockdowns when he had a lot of time on his hands. He was sharpening his sourdough game and trying to find some low-hanging carbon fruit in long overlooked industrial processes. He realized that the humble boiler hadn’t changed much since the Civil War.

“We’ve largely used the same product for the past 160 years,” Stark explains. “I thought ‘We should reinvent that.’”

‘The F-150 of heat pumps’

Aesthetically, there is nothing space-age about the AtmosZero boiler. It looks like a Voltron mashup of electrical transformers and big-box air conditioning units.

Inside the AtmosZero isn’t all that remarkable either, filled with components that are fairly standard in a contemporary heat pump — metal grids, compressors that approximate a jet engine and tubes full of refrigerant.

If AtmosZero does have a secret steam sauce, so to speak, it’s the unit’s compressors. The components are developed in-house to be more aerodynamic than usual and thus able to deliver high temperature steam with a relatively low power demand.

There are plenty of electric boilers on the market. They essentially take air, heat it with a series of compressors and fans to the point where it will boil water. The trick, for most, is to start with warm air, which requires pipes or ductwork to recycle this so-called “waste heat” from around a plant. If one is building a factory from scratch, this extra ductwork is easy to plan (and pay for). But for an existing plant like the New Belgium brewery, the capital expense can swamp the carbon gains.

“The cost of that quickly makes the conversation nearly impossible,” explains Collins at New Belgium.

The AtmosZero boiler, however, is powerful and efficient enough to make steam from ambient air, so it doesn’t need any extra ducts or intricate installation. It just sits on a factory floor like a space heater in a living room. During a cold snap in late winter, it managed to keep pumping out 302F (150C) steam while drawing in air that was 9F.

This allows the company to take a pragmatic sales approach: It’s pitching an appliance, not a construction project. Its boiler requires much less permitting and regulatory approval than the combustion units it’s aiming to cancel.

“It’s plug and play, it’s copy-paste,” Stark said. “It’s like the F-150 of heat pumps.”

Green math

American factories generally run their boilers on natural gas, which is relatively cheap. However, the case for AtmosZero hardware — both financially and environmentally — improves in places like Japan, South Korea and Western Europe, which rely on dirtier, more expensive fossil fuels.

The AtmosZero selling point will only get stronger as electric grids transition to deeper shades of green, further lowering its electric boiler’s operating cost and emissions. Likewise, AtmosZero presents an easy way for factories to meet air quality regulations.

As sales spool up, the company plans to expand its factory in Loveland, Colorado five-fold. Mind you, it is still early days for electric industrial boilers. AtmosZero, at the moment, only has one customer it can talk about and a prototype unit operating at Colorado State University.

The New Belgium plant in Colorado is a good test case. At any given time it’s heating about 400 kegs worth of beer in various stages of the brewing process and often piping extra steam to clean its glasses, cans and kegs.

Colorado slurps relatively cheap natural gas, which keeps the company’s costs down. That said, the steam accounts for slightly more than one quarter of the operation’s entire carbon footprint. The AtmosZero unit will shave off about 9% of its carbon emissions, Collins reckons.

The green math is tilting in its favor. Roughly 40% of the electricity feeding the brewery comes from renewable energy. The company is also harvesting about 15% of its electric load from its premises: It has a small solar farm and collects gas wafting from its brewing beer to power two generators.

When the AtmosZero unit hums to life in the brewery early next month, it will produce about one-third of the facility’s needed steam. More critically, the AtmosZero boiler will be on par financially with the fossil fuel boilers, according to Collins.

“It’s competitive, even without the sort of green rationale,” Stark said. “I did not want to be developing a technology needs to rely on infinite green premiums.”

This story is part of Bloomberg Green’s spring cleaner tech package exploring the money, politics and people shaping the energy transition. Read our other coverage:

To contact the author of this story:
Kyle Stock in Denver at kstock6@bloomberg.net

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