A Finnish Firm Thinks It Can Cut Industrial Carbon Emissions By a Third - Slashd...

The Ecoomist asks: How can we "green" the high-temperature chemical processes in industries like steelmaking or the production of chemical or cement. "Because it is tricky or impossible to produce such temperatures for some industrial processes using electricity alone, firms rely on fossil fuels."

But a Finnish engineering firm called Coolbrook thinks they have an answer:

The easiest way to think about Coolbrook's system is as a gas turbine in reverse. A conventional gas turbine — as used in power stations or jet engines — burns fossil fuel to create a hot, high-pressure gas that spins rotor blades. That rotational energy can be used to run a thrust-generating fan (as in jet aircraft) or converted to electricity in a generator (as in a power station). The new system begins instead with an electric motor. The motor spins the turbine's rotors. Gas or liquid is then fed to the turbine. Once inside, the rotors accelerate the stuff to supersonic speeds, and then rapidly slow it again. The sudden deceleration transforms the kinetic energy contained in the accelerated gas or fluid into heat. If the motor is powered by green electricity, then no carbon dioxide is produced...

Laboratory trials have shown that yields from the electrified process could be significantly higher than what can be obtained with fossil fuels. Assuming that everything goes according to plan, the firm will try producing heat for several other industrial processes... Joonas Rauramo, Coolbrook's boss, reckons his firm's technology could eliminate perhaps 30% of heavy-industrial emissions. And, he says, it can do so without needing to invent anything fundamentally new. "It is a known science," says Mr Rauramo. "It has just not been applied in exactly the way we are doing it."
The article's subheading puts it succinctly. "Running a turbine backwards can produce green heat."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.