Steam powers much of the modern world. It drove the Industrial Revolution, and is still widely used to generate electricity, to sterilize equipment used in food production and medicine, and to heat and cool large buildings.
However, the traditional method of making steam hasn’t changed in more than 150 years. It involves burning fossil fuels like coal or natural gas to heat water in a boiler --, a process which creates harmful emissions.
Which is why Todd Bandhauer felt that the old way was long overdue for an upgrade. He's a professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, and co-founder and chief technical officer of a CSU spinoff company called AtmosZero.
He recently helped develop a method that uses heat from the air, rather than from burning gas or fossil fuels, to make steam generation cleaner. And Bandhauer thinks it could be transformative for manufacturing cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, heating college campuses, and brewing beer.
Earlier this month, Bandhauer was named to the Time 100 Climate list, which recognizes innovations in clean energy.
He joined Erin O’Toole to talk about why making cleaner steam could be transformative for manufacturing around the world – and how it’s already being used at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins.
Highlights from the conversation:
O’Toole: Could you briefly walk me through how steam is traditionally made for industrial use?
Bandhauer: For the last 150 years, you use what is called a package boiler. That boiler brings in water, and you burn a fuel to heat that water up to generate steam. That steam comes out of it and then gets transported via pipes all throughout the factory, and then it gets used on all sorts of industrial processes — like making beer.
O’Toole: And help us picture: how much does steam contribute to carbon emissions and climate change?
Bandhauer: About 8% of all the world's energy used every year is to make steam. It's probably about a third of all the energy used to transport people around — cars, buses, trains, airplanes. It’s on that same order of magnitude, so it's a huge amount.
O’Toole: So your mission was to try to find a new way to generate steam that would cut back greatly on these harmful emissions, and you discovered that a heat pump could replace these traditional fossil fuel powered boilers in very basic terms. Can you explain how this works?
Bandhauer: I think most people know what a heat pump is: Heat pumps are used in houses to basically heat when it's cold outside. What we're making is a super powerful heat pump. That super powerful heat pump allows us to take heat from the air, use electricity, and then generate steam as high as 300 up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. So you don't need to generate that high of a temperature for your house. But for industry, you need way, way higher temperatures. So we have a super powerful heat pump that allows us to do that.
O’Toole: How big is your device and how is it different from a heat pump for homes?
Bandhauer: It basically would provide heat for a whole neighborhood of folks. So not just a single house. The unit that we have in New Belgium probably could heat about 50 homes. So that's the order of magnitude that we're talking about.
O’Toole: What are the biggest challenges to getting this adopted on a wide scale?
Bandhauer: The boiler hasn't been reinvented for 150 years, and so the problem that we're addressing is we want to make it easy for all of our customers to make the switch. We really want to avoid disrupting the process industrial factories. They're 24/7, 365 days a year; if you shut them down for a few hours, they lose money. They lose a lot of money. And so we want to make it as easy as possible. For example, at New Belgium, we connected our system to their facility, opened up a valve, started generating steam, and then their boilers that they had on site were just turned down. And they just kept operating. We want to make sure there's zero interruptions at all to the process.
O’Toole: What kind of industry do you hope will be the next to give this technology a try?
Bandhauer: I think the food and beverage market in general is really ripe for this change. Think cooking. Think cleaning pipes for milk production. Think all sorts of sterilization processes. But of course, as a beer lover, I love making beer. It's incredible.
O’Toole: Attention beer makers!
Bandhauer: Yes, exactly. You know, we're in an old manufacturing facility here in Loveland, Colorado. We're at the Forge campus here on the south side of Loveland, and we are working to re-energize manufacturing here in Colorado. And so it's just really exciting and special to be a part of that.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
