A $65B Global Market in Transition
We are witnessing the genesis of arguably the most important technological shift in the heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) industry: the emergence of environmentally friendly, naturally occurring compounds as refrigerants of choice and the corresponding decline of toxic synthetic refrigerants which have dominated the industry for nearly eight decades.
Heating, cooling and refrigeration are so pervasive in our world that we rarely consider how these basic technologies support our survival. We heat and cool our homes, vehicles and businesses; we refrigerate our food and medicine for storage and distribution; we require thermal energy for countless industrial processes which support the manufacture of the products we use every day.
But what does this all cost in terms of dollars and environmental impact? The annual U.S. energy bill alone is estimated to exceed $3T, with more than 25% consumed to heat and cool just space and water (e.g. hospitals, factories, schools, homes, commercial businesses). In one way, or several, we all personally feel the impact of rising energy costs.
Much of the energy we use today is obtained from burning carbon based fossil fuel (e.g. oil, coal) with by-product carbon emissions pouring out into the world our grandchildren will inherit. To illustrate, a November 2006 report by the Energy Information Administration estimates that vehicles in the U.S. alone leaked over 50 thousand tons of HFC refrigerant R-134a into the atmosphere, equivalent to over 66 million tons of long-duration greenhouse gases.
Rather than burn fossil fuels and create carbon emissions in order to generate heat for our world, a simple and more economical and environmentally friendly approach would be to “find and use” heat and energy sources that already exist, such as geo-thermal water, solar and wind. Of course, these approaches have spawned many products over the years which today are reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
But there is another technology that, since the 1960s and with little notice, has been efficiently capturing renewable heat energy in ambient air and water for numerous heating and cooling applications. The heat pump. The modern heat pump moves heat from where it is not needed (i.e. outside air) to where it is needed (i.e. inside the home). Moving this heat, or thermal energy, is considerably more efficient than creating heat by burning a fossil fuel. Specifically, heat pumps that use an HFC refrigerant are 60% more efficient than a natural gas furnace. However, the conventional heat pump has an Achilles heel: they lose their efficiency in cold climate latitudes. Nonetheless, the value proposition of heat pumps is so compelling that this global market has grown to almost $20B and is the fastest growing segment in the HVACR industry, with annual growth exceeding 17%.
The power of heat pump technology ~ to recycle a clean, renewable, and inexhaustible source of heat energy “found” in the atmosphere (and water bodies) ~ is to harness the power of the sun and “decarbonize” our energy sources.
Why this growing interest in natural refrigerants? For starters, these compounds are environmentally friendly. CO2, for example, comes from the same source that puts the fizz in soda pop - recycled industrial production or directly from the atmosphere. If it leaks, it goes back from whence it came. More importantly, naturally occurring carbon dioxide has great promise to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of heat pumps, while meeting long term market and regulatory demands for environmentally friendly and sustainable product. The heat transfer efficiency of transcritical CO2 is much greater than HFC refrigerants, which translates to a compact unit with a small footprint and exceptional heating efficiencies, providing higher temperature heating even from subfreezing temperature sources. Carbon dioxide also avoids the flammability concerns of other widely used natural refrigerants such as propane and butane.
What does this all have to do with the EcoThermics compressor? Well, a compressor is the enabling technology of the heat pump. The industry is waiting for viable compressors to enter the market in order to build better heat pumps. EcoThermics started over ten years ago with a compressor designed specifically for the unique properties and high pressure environment of CO2. This strategy continues to unfold as we observe the competition trying to adapt low-pressure compressor designs to a high-pressure application. As our Chief Scientist Rod Hugelman once said, “If this were easy, it would have been done by now.” We believe our prototype leads its 3-7 ton size class today. It is our goal to have the first available CO2 compressor in the market in our size range.
The EcoThermics compressor is expected to be more efficient than any CO2 compressor is its size range, while providing additional economic value from application flexibility, low cost manufacturability, scalability, modular add-on technologies and a small footprint.