Heineken plans to install a 100-megawatt heat battery at a brewery in Portugal under a service contract with vendor Rondo Energy and energy company EDP. The technology will significantly reduce or eliminate the European brewer’s need for boilers that run on fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas.
“This project not only helps us reduce our reliance on conventional energy, it shows how practical innovation and strong partnerships can deliver meaningful improvements across our supply chain,” said Magne Setnes, chief supply officer at Heineken, in a statement.
Industrial emissions related to food production, manufacturing and other heat-intensive processes account for close to one-quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; if you include emissions related to making steel and cement, the number rises close to 40 percent.
Adoption of options for addressing that footprint has been slow, but thermal batteries are making in-roads alongside other options such as industrial heat pumps and renewable natural gas sourced from biomethane.
Technology manufacturer Siemens, for example, discovered that installing electrified paint drying and curing ovens at its factories in Texas could reduce almost 80 percent of the emissions related to that process, said Stacy Mahler, vice president of vertical markets at Siemens, during a session at Trellis Impact 25.
“We had to go and look at paint chemistries that would work with the new electric ovens, which were lower temperature,” she said. “So there was a lot of work that went into it. The good news is once you do that work, once the learnings can scale, you can share that with suppliers.”
PepsiCo’s biomethane investment
Projects for reducing factory emissions have been slow to take shape in part because an approach that works in one location isn’t appropriate everywhere, said another Trellis Impact 25 panelist, Nora Singh, senior director of global sustainability at PepsiCo.
“Some of them are very expensive and the solutions are also not one size fits all, and they’re very local, depending on where in the world you’re looking at,” Singh said.
One way that PepsiCo is reducing emissions is by turning organic waste at its food processing facilities into biomethane gas.
Its facility in Manisa, Turkey, for example, uses cogeneration equipment to convert potatoes, other starches and oils into enough biogas to meet 35 percent of the electricity needs, avoiding 1,370 tons of carbon dioxide in 2024. The rest of the electricity needed for the operation is sourced from solar panel and renewable energy companies. “Obviously it doesn’t work everywhere,” Singh said.
Nike: Borrow from other industries
The transition related to footwear and apparel maker Nike’s industrial emissions is happening in multiple phases.
Some factories in its supply chain are moving away from coal but choosing short-term alternatives such as biomass, said Nike’s Courtenay McHugh, director of climate and environment, during the panel discussion.
That creates new obstacles, including the need to ensure that the biomass is sourced from waste and not from deforestation.