3 ways PepsiCo, Nike and Heineken reduce industrial emissions
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.
“You have to have really good certification processes for that,” said McHugh. “Biomass is, for us, considered to be a transition option, but it’s not the last stop on the road.”
Nike uses the levelized cost of heating — the average cost to produce a unit of heat over the lifetime of a piece of equipment — to evaluate alternatives for parts of its manufacturing process that are difficult to electrify, such as fabric dying.
One of the best options it has found are steam heat pumps, used widely by the pulp and paper industry in the drying process. The downside is that this technology hasn’t been used for textile applications and carries a high upfront cost. Nike is collaborating with the Apparel Impact Institute to perform feasibility studies — largely in China, India and Vietnam, where renewable electricity is available — that are also supported by other brands.
“We’re prepared that it’s not necessarily the way that we need to go in all cases,” said McHugh, “but we might get some really great learnings about where it is most optimal, so that we can share that information with our suppliers, give them a little bit more confidence in this technology as a path forward.”
Heineken’s battery project
Those studies will also evaluate what sorts of financing models might be effective at accelerating adoption, including leases rather than outright purchases.
Heineken is exercising that option: Its battery is being procured under a service agreement, so it won’t represent a capital expenditure for the company. It will charge using an on-site solar installation and provide up to 7 megawatts of steam for its brewing processes without requiring a massive equipment retrofit.
Heineken’s installation, the largest of its kind in the beverage industry, will begin operation in April 2027.
Rondo is a well-funded supplier, with backers including apparel company H&M. Its technology stores heat in refractory bricks then releases it at temperatures of up to 100 bar, or about 340 degrees Fahrenheit, to power industrial processes. The startup signed another deal Nov. 13 that will support a cement factory in Thailand.
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