Engineering the future
demonstrating year-round durability and reliability of the system as the team works to build out their backlog of orders and prepare to scale. Stark says once the system is brought to a customer’s facility, it can be installed in an afternoon and deployed in a matter of days, with zero downtime. AtmosZero is aiming to deliver a handful of units to customers over the next year or two, with plans to deploy hundreds of units a year after that. The company is currently targeting manufacturing plants using under 10 megawatts of thermal energy at peak demand, which represents most US manufacturing facilities. Stark is proud to be part of a growing group of MIT-affiliated de- carbonisation startups, some of which are targeting specific verticals, like Boston Metal [3] for steel and Sublime Systems [4] for cement. But he says beyond the most common materials, the industry gets very frag- mented, with one of the only common threads being the use of steam. “If we look across industrial segments, we see the ubiquity of steam,” Stark says. “It’s a ripe opportunity to have impact at scale. Steam cannot be removed from industry. So much of every industrial process that we’ve designed over the last 160 years has been around the availability of steam. So, we need to focus on ways to deliver low-emissions steam rather than removing it from the equation.” References [1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30575-4 [2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30575-4?_re- turnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2F- pii%2FS2542435120305754%3Fshowall%3Dtrue [3] https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-spinout-boston-metal-makes-steel-with-electrici- ty-0522 [4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/sustainable-cement-startup-sublime-eliminates-co2-gi- gatons-0809
come an entrepreneur, but he soon realised no one was going to act on his findings for him. “The only path to seeing this invention brought out into the world was to form and run the company,” Stark says. “It’s something I didn’t anticipate or necessarily want, but here I am.” Stark partnered with former ARPA-E awardee Todd Band- hauer, who had been inventing new refrigerant compressor technology in his lab at Colorado State University, and former ARPA-E colleague Ashwin Salvi. The team officially founded AtmosZero in 2022. “The compressor is the engine of the heat pump and de- fines the efficiency, cost, and performance,” Stark says. “The fundamental challenge of delivering heat is that the higher your heat pump is raising the air temperature, the lower your maximum efficiency. It runs into thermodynamic limitations. By designing for optimum efficiency in the operational win- dows that matter for the refrigerants we’re using, and for the precision manufacturing of our compressors, we’re able to maximise the individual stages of compression to maximise operational efficiency.” The system can work with waste heat from air or water, but it doesn’t need waste heat to work. Many other electric boilers rely on waste heat, but Stark thinks that adds too much com- plexity to installation and operations. Instead, in AtmosZero’s novel heat pump cycle, heat from ambient-temperature air is used to warm a liquid heat trans- fer material, which evaporates a refrigerant so it flows into the system’s series of compressors and heat exchangers, reaching high enough temperatures to boil water while recovering heat from the refrigerant once it reaches lower temperatures. The system can be ramped up and down to fit seamlessly into ex- isting industrial processes. “We can work just like a combustion boiler,” Stark says.
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“Customers don’t want to change how their manu- facturing facilities operate in order to electrify. You can’t change or increase complexity on-site.” That approach means the boiler can be de- ployed in a range of in- dustrial contexts without unique project costs or other changes. “What we really offer is flexibility and something that can drop in with ease and minimise total capital costs,” Stark says. From 1 to 1 000 AtmosZero already has a pilot 650 kilowatt system operating at a custom- er’s facility near its head- quarters in Loveland, Colorado. The company is currently focused on
Stark says once the system is brought to a customer’s facility, it can be installed in an afternoon and deployed in a matter of days, with zero downtime.
APRIL 2026 Electricity + Control
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