At the Brightlands Chemelot Campus, near the Dutch city of Geleen, a kindred group of engineers are plugging away on a novel pilot project they describe as “game-changing” industrial technology – the replacement of conventional fossil fuel dependent high temperature equipment by a low carbon solution that uses only electricity.
The motley group hails from Finland-headquartered pan-European firm Coolbrook, and they are almost ready for a commercial launch expected early in 2025, according to CEO Joonas Rauramo.
“For the last 70 to 80 years the wider global industrial and petrochemical complex has operated in pretty much the same way, with fossil fuel consuming furnaces for high heat generation at the heart of the plant. We are offering a new kind of technology – one that uses only electricity to generate heat or crack hydrocarbons to produce ethylene or propylene.”
Coolbrook’s patented technology – RotoDynamic – generates the heat via a rotating device without the need to burn anything. The company demonstrated to your correspondent how air (or a gaseous substance of any kind) enters their machine where a motor is rotating on an axis with air blades.
The blades accelerate the air to supersonic velocity which is subsequently lowered down to subsonic velocity, thereby generating a shock wave reaction that converts kinetic energy to high intensity thermal energy very rapidly. The heat is generated in milliseconds volumetrically inside the gas and is not transferred from outside through a surface.
“The temperature generation can be increased in multiples of 200 C (392 F) up to 1700 C. That’s enough to meet pretty much all processes you can imagine in the current industrial complex. RotoDynamic can also handle almost any type of gaseous substance from steam to nitrogen, CO2 to methane.”
Use cases and what’s under the hood?
Coolbrook has identified over 40 use cases for its product, especially in high temperature carbon intensive industries like cement, steel and petrochemicals. “Our technology allows customers to decarbonize cost efficiently, fast and at scale. It has the potential to be the most potent and significant single technology to reduce industrial CO2 emissions globally by 2 billion tons annually,” Rauramo adds.
The opportunity is immense as industries seek solutions in their march to a net zero carbon horizon. “The whole concept of generating high industrial scale temperatures from electricity would have been considered silly as recently as 20 years ago because electricity itself was largely produced with fossil fuels.
“But this isn’t the case anymore, and our technology can enable industries sourcing the electricity from renewables to cut emissions across their assembly chain.”
Rauramo says what Coolbrook has put together under RotoDynamic’s hood is based on existing components on a larger scale, including having the rotating blades supplied by aerospace firms like GE and Rolls-Royce. “There are no black boxes inside our products.”
The company’s most visible technological collaboration is with Swiss engineering firm ABB which has been its longstanding partner. Academic input is being provided by experts at Cambridge, Ghent and Oxford Universities, and via wider research and development operations in the U.K.
The end product of this collaborative endeavor currently provides an electricity-to-heat generation efficiency of around 95%.
“Our technology has two siblings – a simpler heat generating version to provide pure heating without industrial reactions (needed for instance by steel and aluminum industries), and a heat plus chemical reactor version (needed by the petrochemicals industry for ethylene, propylene and other high value chemical production).
“In many cases, we can also improve the overall process efficiency by regathering / recirculating waste heat, which in conventional process would go the chimney. Therefore, in theory we can reach 120% efficiency. Our reactor yields are also significantly higher versus conventional kits and come with the added advantage of having one piece of equipment to fulfill a dual purpose for petrochemical companies.”
Rauramo also claims Coolbrook’s technology is significantly more compact that any conventional heating or industrial cracking system. “This makes it attractive for brownfield as well as greenfield sites with capital and operating expenditure savings, and improved throughput. It is relatively simple to retrofit to brownfield sites and requires no further downstream changes.”
Market potential
With not long to go before a commercial launch, and having poured €12 million ($13.11 million) into R&D, Rauramo is cautiously optimistic about Coolbrook’s success.
“The industrial heating market is in the ballpark figure of €1 trillion, while the global market for the replacement of conventional high-temperature industrial equipment by less polluting alternatives is worth €400 billion, according to KPMG. We intend to be at the forefront of taking advantage of this commercial opportunity.”
Twelve months after a planned commercial launch and a potential first large scale deliver early in 2025, Rauramo is targeting a revenue base of €100 million in 2026-27, and €1 billion in 2027-28. “And several multiples thereafter depending on market conditions.”
This is seconded by Coolbrook’s global partner ecosystem with the likes Shell, Braskem, Linde Engineering, Ineos, Ultratech Cement, CEMEX, Sabic, ArcelorMittal, JSW, Schmidtsche Schack, and ABB. “With our existing partnership numbers there is enough of a market to reach these numbers.”
While the company’s pilot project at Geleen is just under 1MW capacity, its first commercial deliveries will be in the 5MW to 10MW range. “The initial temperature we are aiming for is 1000 C with the first phase of deliveries, followed by 1200 C, 1500 C and 1700 C respectively.”
The next couple of years will be critical and Coolbrook will fiercely protect its intellectual property. “Units to be delivered initially will be manufactured in third party facilities before the natural progression of having our own assembly facilities. Our starting point is that even if we procure components from outside, we own the design, and do the assembly and commissioning ourselves.
Initial deployments are likely to be in Europe but Rauramo is counting on business in emerging markets like India where it recently opened an office. “However, near-term growth would be driven by companies and their desire to decarbonize, and not geographies. Societal and systemic changes needed to achieve net zero will also come in to play to varying degrees in multiple global markets.
“Overall, we don’t really see direct competition in exactly what we are doing. In the case of high temperature, high volume low-carbon electrified industrial solutions – we are clearly the leader hoping to make electric factories a commercial reality.”
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