Chemical Heat Transformer

The Qpinch heat transformer uses a reversible chemical reaction to capture the energy from waste heat – which is now lost – to turn it into new valuable process heat. It recovers residual heat from 40 °C and up, transforming it to new process heat with very high temperature increases of up to 100 °C.

The megawatt-scale technology is applicable in the process industries that use large amounts of heat: refineries, petrochemicals, food and paper. Due to its concept – the use of a chemical process to produce heat – the electrical energy required is marginal.

This new approach to recovering waste heat overcomes the many hurdles that render other technologies economically or technically non-viable.

• Unlimited scalability (from 1-100+ MW) and easy to integrate
• High temperature lifts of 50 °C or more
• Broadly applicable
• Process heat & cooling debottlenecking: reduces the load on the cooling utilities
• Can operate under fluctuating conditions (temperature and duty)
• Gross electrical energy consumption only 3-4 % of output duty (savings not included)
• Marginal operational cost, low-maintenance
• ATEX approved
• Uses food-grade chemicals

• High-temperature applications with waste heat starting at 80 °C and up, mainly oil refineries, petrochemical and chemical industries that require process heat between 120 °C and 250 °C
• Low-temperature applications (Food, Paper & Pulp): waste heat starting at 40 °C and up

Examples in refineries and petrochemicals:

Recovering waste heat from:

• Column overheads
• Exothermic reactor cooling
• Product rundowns
• Excess Low-Pressure steam

To produce steam (or other process heat) for:

• Reboilers
• Reactors
• The steam network
• Heating up product streams

Examples in food and paper:

• Recovering energy from saturated hot air in drying processes and producing hot very dry air

Qpinch exploits waste heat from a chemical industry production process, e.g. hydrocarbon vapors that are now cooled with air coolers or cooling. This energy is instead used by the Qpinch unit to produce process heat. This way, half of the energy now completely lost is recovered. In addition, it also reduces the load on the cooling utilities by 50%.

The output – usually steam in the case of petrochemicals – can be returned to the original process, the steam network or another process nearby.

The temperature jumps that Qpinch can generate produces process heat within the temperature zone where there is much demand, i.e., 120 – 220 °C. Further research and development is aiming to reach 250 °C; a sweet spot for certain niche markets.

• CO₂ reduction: 2 200 tonnes per MW per year
• Cost savings (per MW duty and per year): € 200 000 – 300 000 energy cost savings; in addition to
  € 55 000 savings in CO₂ taxes (assuming and ETS + Dutch CO₂ tax of € 25/tonne CO₂)

• Reduces the load on the cooling utilities which generate additional savings and possibly also debottlenecks them
• Reduces the load on process heat utilities, i.e., process heat debottlenecking

• Borealis, Kuraray and SABIC in EPC phase