OilPrice: "Heat Pumps Are Coming for Coal’s Industrial Heat Market," by Haley Zaremba.
'A challenging target is coal-fired heat in hard-to-abate sectors, a tougher job than the low-temperature building heat pumps that get most of the attention." A new breakthrough in high-temperature heat pumps could provide a critical pathway toward relieving global reliance on fossil fuels in industrial contexts. "A team of scientists at the [famed] Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Fraunhofer ISE) in Germany tested heat pumps at 320ºF = 160ºC and proved that they can produce hot water + steam, showing promise for replacing coal in hard-to-abate manufacturing sectors."
“Data collected from the test rig could allow manufacturers to design heat pumps + heat exchangers for high temperatures, large loads, + changing conditions,” states a recent report. According to the International Energy Agency’s definition of a heat pump, the technology can extract heat from sources including “the surrounding air, geothermal energy underground, or nearby sources of water or waste heat from a factory.” The configuration of a heat pump includes a compressor, which propels a refrigerant through a closed loop, and a heat exchanger, which extracts thermal energy from a given heat source, in this case butane used not as a fuel but rather a refrigerant or "phase change material."
Globally, the energy for industrial applications largely comes from coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. "The data being produced at Fraunhofer ISE could help refine a new generation of safe, cost-effective, and low-emissions industrial processes at a time when decarbonization is sorely needed." Targeting hard-to-abate manufacturing processes is one of the trickiest parts of the decarbonization puzzle, and one that we’re now one step closer to solving.
This is one of the many puzzle pieces we need—eliminating coal burners to rapidly combat global warming.
