Harper furnace installed for direct air capture
GlobalSpec News Desk | December 15, 2023A custom engineered, 24-inch rotary tube furnace built by Harper International for Heirloom Carbon Technologies in San Francisco, California, is enabling America’s first commercial Direct Air Capture (DAC) in the facility in California’s Central Valley. Heirloom’s DAC facility uses calcium carbonate to remove already-emitted carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The furnace uses indirect, electric heating to remove CO2 captured by the calcium carbonate so it can be permanently stored, never to return to the atmosphere. The furnace is rated to a temperature of 950° C and has an annual capacity of 1,000 metric tons per year.
“We are delighted to see Harper’s technology deployed in support of climate initiatives. The design is derived from Harper’s significant experience in providing electrically heated, rotary furnaces to a wide array of advanced materials industries, and it has been custom-engineered to provide Heirloom engineers with a flexible platform for optimizing their process as they scale up to higher capacities,” said Harper vice president, Paul Elwell.
“Harper has an excellent reputation in thermal processing system development and manufacturing. This collaboration matched Harper’s development expertise with Heirloom’s need to implement a solution that is specific to our process needs and operational environment. Together we look to learn much from this initial installation as Heirloom continues to scale our technology,” said Shashank Samala, co-founder and CEO at Heirloom.