Skip to main content
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
MIT
Close

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
PostJune 27, 2023

How electrifying steam could cut beer’s carbon emissions

Image of Fat Tire ale 6-pack
Photo Credit
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | NEW BELGIUM BREWING, ENVATO

Next year, New Belgium Brewing will swap out one of the four natural-gas-powered boilers at its main brewing facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, for an electrified version designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

The modular, 650-kilowatt pilot boiler system was developed by AtmosZero, a startup also based in Fort Collins and coming out of stealth today.

“To decarbonize industry, we must decarbonize heat,” says Addison Stark, chief executive and cofounder of the startup. 

Indeed, heat production from industry may account for around 10% of global carbon dioxide pollution. The sector relies heavily on steam to transfer heat, sterilize equipment and goods, and separate chemicals. Globally, the practice could generate more than 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution per year, according to an earlier analysis by Stark and a colleague.

New Belgium Brewing, best known for producing Fat Tire ale, uses vast amounts of steam to fine-tune the temperatures within its boil kettles, helping to draw out flavors from hops and grains at crucial points of the beer-making process.

Electric boilers that can draw power mostly from renewables like solar and wind do exist and are already used in manufacturing. But they generally rely on resistive heating, which produces heat by passing an electric current through a conductive material, or the water in the boiler. That sucks up a lot of electricity and pushes up costs, which has prevented such devices from grabbing much market share to date, says Stark, previously a fellow and acting director at ARPA-E, the US Department of Energy’s advanced research arm.

Instead, AtmosZero leans on heat pump technology, which uses electricity to circulate refrigerants with low boiling points through a closed loop. The device draws in heat from the surrounding air, uses a compressor to increase the temperature of the refrigerant enough to boil water, and then transfers that thermal energy through a heat exchanger into a vessel that produces steam.

Heat pumps can be far more efficient than products that rely on resistive heating because, as MIT Technology Review’s Casey Crownhart laid out in an earlier explainer, most of the electricity is used to gather heat and move it around, rather than producing it directly.

Stark says that a commercial version of the company’s device could be up to twice as efficient as resistive boilers. 

Read the full story at MIT Technology Review.

by MIT Technology Review
Topics
Energy
Electrification
Fossil Fuels
Industry & Manufacturing

Related Posts

PostJune 5, 2025

How will U.S. land use change by 2050?

MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy
How will U.S. land use change by 2050?
PodcastJune 5, 2025

Unraveling DNA to transform carbon

MIT Energy Initiative
PostJune 2, 2025

AI stirs up the recipe for concrete in MIT study

MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub
A team led by Soroush Mahjoubi, a postdoc in civil and environmental engineering, built a machine-learning framework that evaluates and sorts candidate materials for cleaner concrete based on their physical and chemical properties. “Some of the most interesting materials that could replace a portion of cement are ceramics,” notes Mahjoubi. “Old tiles, bricks, pottery — all these materials may have high reactivity.”
PostMay 30, 2025

A test bed for sustainable manufacturing

MIT Spectrum
An illustration of a person holding a globe. Coins are being sucked out of the globe and into a cloud of smoke pouring out of a factory, presenting environmental cost.

MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

 
 

MIT Groups Log In

Log In

Footer

  • About
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Contact
MIT Climate Project
MIT
Communicator Award Winner
Communicator Award Winner

 

Cancel