Factories are cleaning up their steam with hyper-efficient heat pumps

Posted: January 06, 2026

Heat has powered industry throughout its entire history, from making stone-age birch pitch and Roman concrete to driving steam engines and smelting steel. 

Unfortunately, its use still largely depends on burning gas, coal or oil. That means, by some estimates, industrial heat now accounts for more than a fifth of total global carbon emissions. 

Not all heat is made equal, however. In the U.S., around 80% of the fossil fuels used by factories go into heating. Half of that is for high-heat processes: Think steel blast furnaces or cement kilns. The other half goes into boilers to produce steam for making paper, producing chemicals and even brewing beer.^[1]

These lower temperature processes could now be ripe for decarbonization, thanks to more modular and cost-effective solutions that rely on a transplant from the home: heat pumps.

Switching factories from boilers to heat pumps 

Earlier this year, New Belgium Brewing installed a new boiler at its brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. It appears fairly unremarkable: a shipping container, topped with an array of what look like huge triangular air conditioners. But the system, made by start-up AtmosZero, has an intriguing pitch. 

Electric boilers heat air to boil water and produce steam, but traditional models rely on waste heat for their input—which requires costly integration into a factory’s existing infrastructure. AtmosZero’s model can take in ambient air, thanks to the unit’s more powerful compressors. This means it can simply be dropped into any setting with minimal hook-ups. 

“It’s plug and play, it’s copy-paste,” the company’s founder and CEO, Addison Stark, told Bloomberg. “It’s like the F-150 of heat pumps.” 

The company is part of a growing crop of start-ups trying to market heat pumps to industrial customers looking to lower their carbon footprint and benefit from changing economics as the power mix becomes increasingly renewable. 

Even more advanced solutions could already be on the horizon. The European Commission recently launched a €1 billion auction to support projects for electrifying industrial process heat—name-checking heat pumps and boilers alongside plasma torches, resistance and induction heating and direct renewable heat from solar thermal or geothermal installations. 

The benefits of heat pumps for industrial facilities 

While some factories have adopted electric-resistance boilers, these machines—like their gas-fired equivalents—have a maximum efficiency of 100%, meaning all the energy that goes into them comes out as heat. 

Heat pumps, which use electricity, a refrigerant and a compressor to turn air or water into heat, can reach efficiencies of 300% and more. Moving heat, in other words, is much more effective than producing it from scratch. 

Some firms are trying to go one step further by tapping waste heat from factories’ existing boilers, which means the input air is hotter to begin with and uses less energy as a result.  

Skyven Technologies, another U.S.-based start-up, has designed a system that uses waste heat from a conventional gas boiler to heat water, which is turned into steam in a vacuum chamber and then compressed. In a pilot project, the technology has reached efficiencies of above 600%, according to the company. 

Those figures are important for the economics of heat pumps, since natural gas—at least in the U.S.—is cheaper than electricity, and companies would need to spend money on switching out their equipment, too. 

Manufacturers are betting that electricity prices will go down as more of the power mix becomes renewable, lowering the heat pumps’ operating costs. And several states have or are considering incentives to get factories to adopt lower-emission technologies, as well as air-quality regulations and cheap financing for decarbonization projects. 

But companies like Skyven and AtmosZero are also trying to make the switch as painless as possible. Both promise to install their systems without interrupting factory operations. Skyven even covers the cost of installation and then splits the operating cost savings with its customer. The company makes sure to switch the factory’s legacy gas boilers back on whenever the price of electricity rises so high that it negates the heat pump’s efficiency gain, for example. 

How industrial heat pumps can replace boilers for low-temperature needs 

One advantage of traditional boilers is that they can reach higher temperatures—a key concern for heat-dependent industries. 

But new heat pumps have been shown to reach the key range required for most low- and mid-temperature processes, from lumber curing to food processing to chemical production. Skyven’s unit, for instance, can heat steam to above 200 degrees Celsius; that’s enough to cover roughly 55% of industrial process heat needs, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.^[2]

Researchers from the Environmental Change Institute and the Danish Technological Institute have found that, by 2030, high-temperature heat pumps using free excess heat sources could achieve up to 75% lower operating costs than hydrogen boilers and up to 40% lower than biomass. Even with high electricity prices, the researchers say they would remain the most cost-effective and energy-efficient technology up to 150 degrees. 

To date, ACEEE counts 15 industrial heat pumps in place already across the U.S., with twice that on the way. Although there are likely many more, the number pales in comparison with the tens of thousands of industrial boilers sitting on factory floors. 

AtmosZero’s 650-kW pilot at New Belgium Brewing has only been running for a few months, during which time the company has been using a steady stream of data to improve on the design. It now plans to start selling its heat pumps more widely starting in 2026. Stark, the CEO, is convinced the tech will take off. 

“I want to see electrification [across] industry and actually get ourselves on track to get to the emissions reductions that we all want to see in this century,” he told Canary Media. “The only path to that is steam decarbonization.”