Just three industries—chemicals, steel and cement—account for around a fifth of all man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. A Finnish engineering firm is working on ways to clean them up
Extracting iron from its ore, for instance, is the first step in steelmaking. Temperatures inside the furnaces used to do that can exceed 1,600°C. Cement kilns, which convert limestone into clinker, one of cement’s raw ingredients, can reach 1,400°C. Because it is tricky or impossible to produce such temperatures for some industrial processes using electricity alone, firms rely on fossil fuels.
At the Brightlands Campus, a state- and industry-backed innovation centre near Maastricht, in the Netherlands, a Finnish engineering firm called Coolbrook is hoping to change that. Its “RotoDynamic” system is designed to supply just the sorts of super-high temperatures needed by heavy industry—and to do so while being powered solely by electricity.The easiest way to think about Coolbrook’s system is as a gas turbine in reverse.
The first test of the pilot plant at Brightlands will involve steam cracking, one of the most energy-intensive processes in petrochemical plants. Conventional crackers decompose naphtha, one component of crude oil, into smaller molecules. As the name suggests, this is done by diluting the naphtha with steam then blasting it, in the absence of oxygen, in a furnace.
Assuming that everything goes according to plan, the firm will try producing heat for several other industrial processes. Joonas Rauramo, Coolbrook’s boss, reckons the heater should be able to hit temperatures of up to 1,700°C. That would make it suitable for a number of energy-intensive applications, including the production of steel, cement, glass and ceramics. Several big firms have signed on as partners for the pilot project.
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