Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing traces its roots back to a 1988 bike trip through Belgium.
This experience inspired co-founders Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch to bring Belgian brewing techniques back to their homeland.
Three years later, the pair sold one of their first beers, Fat Tire, at local festivals and now produce more than a dozen beers.
But while they've spent 30 years creating flavors unique to the U.S. market, all breweries have at least one thing in common. It's the use of steam.
Steam is not only used to disinfect brewing equipment, but is also an important part of the brewing process.
A large conical kettle is used to boil the wort (the liquid extracted from the initial brewing stage of grinding the barley) and generate steam.
This boiling process helps brewers remove unwanted flavors from their beer before transferring the wort to a container and fermenting it with yeast to make beer.
Some of the steam produced by the kettle is captured by a heat exchanger, and the brewer can use this waste heat in the next brew batch.
Steam, the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, remains critical to production processes in multiple industries.
Steam is frequently used in the food and beverage industry, as well as for sterilization by pharmaceutical companies and heating a wide range of buildings such as hospitals.
However, steam is still primarily produced using boilers that run on fossil fuels, resulting in a large carbon footprint.
Fossil fuels accounted for 73% of U.S. industrial energy use in 2018, 40% of which was used to heat boilers that produce steam.
One option to reduce this is to switch to electricity. Assuming the electricity is generated from sustainable sources, the carbon footprint is reduced.
However, there are also disadvantages to using electricity.
“The biggest challenge is cost, and this is likely to limit the pace of customer adoption,” said Maurizio Preziosa of UK-based engineering firm Spirax Group.
Cost may be an issue, but switching is relatively easy.
Preziosa says his company's technology can typically be integrated into existing systems.
“Customers can continue to use the rest of their existing Steam infrastructure,” Preziosa explains.
This has the added benefit of reducing downtime, which is a potential barrier to implementation for companies that rely on tightly regulated production processes.
US-based AtmosZero takes a different approach to steam generation. Their boilers are heat pumps, which extract heat from the air and convert it into hot steam.
A liquid refrigerant with a low boiling point is circulated in a closed loop to capture warmth from the air.
The slightly warmed refrigerant is compressed and raised to a temperature sufficient to boil water.
A heat exchanger then transfers heat from the refrigerant to the water to produce steam.
The big advantage of this approach is that it reduces operational costs.
Addison Stark, the company's chief executive officer, estimates that the company's heat pump technology could potentially save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to currently available options.
“As it is a heat pump-based system, it is significantly more efficient than current boilers. For every unit of energy input, approximately two units of heat output are produced, significantly reducing operating costs.” explains Stark.
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AtmosZero is still in its early stages and requires further development work. The goal is to build a manufacturing plant and begin delivering boiler systems in early 2026.
Stark is confident the system will work at the scale the industry needs. “We are mass produced and easy to deploy.”
Manufacturers of green steam equipment expect demand to increase in the coming years.
“End-consumer expectations are changing,” explains Maurizio Preziosa of Spirax Group.
“They want to reduce their impact on people and the planet and buy from sustainably managed companies. This, combined with regulatory pressures, means that our companies serving those consumers It’s driving demand from customers,” he says.
Back in Colorado, at New Belgium Brewing, AtmosZero is in the process of replacing one of the brewery's combustion boilers with a heat pump system.
This is the next step in the company's commitment to sustainability, which dates back to its early days selling beer at local festivals.
In addition to installing solar panels and generating electricity from wastewater, one of their first beers, Fat Tire, became America's first certified carbon neutral beer in August 2020.
This is part of the company's broader ambition to become fully carbon neutral by 2030.
Changing the way we use steam could be an important step toward this goal.