Bart van Overbeeke/TU Eindhoven
- After 300 years in business, a Dutch brewery is heating beer using sustainable iron combustion.
- Replacing high heat for furnaces or boilers has been a special challenge for renewables.
- Burnt iron is "recharged" for reuse using electrolysis that can come from clean energy sources.
A brewery in the Netherlands is making environmental history by using a cycle of renewable iron as fuel for its furnace.
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Royal Swinkels Family Brewers is working with Eindhoven University of Technology and a technology think tank called Metal Power on the circular economy of iron burning. “The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat,” New Atlas reports.
Here’s how it works: Iron is burned in furnaces, fulfilling a key industry requirement for high heat that isn’t covered by many other renewables. Then, the resulting oxidized rust waste is recycled back into newly re-burnable iron fuel using electrical energy that can be from clean sources. In February, Eindhoven University researcher Niels Dean explained in a statement:
"Iron powder is also easy to transport and can be recycled. If you combust iron powder with hot gases to drive a turbine or an engine, rust powder remains. Using hydrogen produced from electricity surpluses from sustainable sources you turn it into iron powder again. That's how you extract the oxygen from the rust particles."
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The researchers also explain why this hasn’t really been explored in the commercial sector before. It’s simple: Fossil fuels were the right combination of plentiful and relatively cheap to dominate the energy market for decades. Even today, Eindhoven University says, iron powder is funneled through a scant handful of suppliers around the world. Production would need to be scaled up for wider energy usage.
Brewery Bavaria in the Netherlands, owned by Royal Swinkels and operated for over 300 years, says it’s the first business in the world to begin using a cyclical iron-burning furnace. “As a family business, we invest in a sustainable and circular economy because we think in terms of generations, not years,” CEO and descendent Peer Swinkels tells New Atlas.
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Beer is heated at different points during the brewing process, sometimes merely hot and sometimes to a full boil. This kind of heat is a challenge for renewable energy or even simply electricity. Home users of electric stoves know the burners must gradually warm up to temperature, which is fine for individual home use, but could constrict the timelines of a brewery that makes 15 million servings of beer a year, for example.
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But the government of the Netherlands has introduced a strict timeline to phase out the use of natural gas by 2022. This has incentivized researchers to find a totally different path—the iron cycle creates heat by burning, yet the burning is cleaner and the results are recyclable. For industries that require high heat, electricity and heat from iron combustion are one version of the future.
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Burning Iron for Fuel Sounds Crazy. It's Also the Future. - Popular Mechanics
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