Heat is a required element in the process of alcohol distillation, and much of that heat is derived from burning dirty fuels, but that may be changing.
Between penalties in Europe and government incentives in the U.S., companies are being pressured into embracing cleaner, more sustainable technologies for their industrial processes.
The Glentauchers distillery in Speyside, Scotland, is a whisky producer that still leans on burning dirty fuels to boil grain mash and distill the alcohol vapors, as Canary Media details. But it's now adding cleaner technology into the mix by using a simplified version of a heat pump to harness its waste heat and reduce its carbon footprint.
Notably, this change was initiated by a 2026 "carbon neutral distillation" goal from the distillery's parent company, Chivas Brothers.
"The waste-heat recovery resource that's collectively available across industry is staggering," as Blaine Collison, executive director of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative, relayed in the article.
Collison's team conducts case studies on innovative projects, including the one at Glentauchers. They concluded that heat pumps are already a cost-effective solution for collecting low-temperature waste heat in industrial settings.
This particular tech, built by Piller Blowers and Compressors in Germany, uses mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) to take vapor that's below needed temps and use electrical energy to compress and transfer it. Since it only uses one of the four main steps used by traditional heat pumps, it's been called "heat pump-adjacent" by Caldwell Reed, vice president of sales and project management for Piller TSC Blower, the U.S. subsidiary, per the article.
U.S. industrial facilities use low-temperature heat (up to around 266 degrees Fahrenheit) for a variety of processes, making up about 35 percent of heat-processing demand, according to Energy Innovation.
Low-temperature industrial heating produced 171 million metric tons (around 188 million tons) of planet-warming CO2 in 2021, which is 3.5% of all U.S. energy-related air pollution.
With the MVR system, Glentauchers can capture the low-temperature heat energy, compress it, and raise temperatures with electricity to make it viable again. This method gets them 10 to 12 units of thermal energy from just one kilowatt of electricity, according to Reed.
Per the company's case study, the system has reduced energy consumption at the distillery by nearly half and decreased carbon pollution by 53%.
Heat pumps have been surging in popularity in both residential and commercial settings, and with the Inflation Reduction Act, homeowners can get a $2,000 tax credit when purchasing one.
The U.S. government has also been funding innovative new planet-friendly designs, and as Canary Media shares, $6 billion in grants have gone to new projects aiming to slash industrial pollution. Of that amount, $500 million is specifically for industrial process-heat technologies.
There seems to be little reason not to adopt this cleaner, greener technology. As Reed explained: "A lot of these projects are just economically viable in their own right, depending on the cost of electricity and the cost of whatever energy they're using to run their boiler."
The International Energy Agency has been developing scenarios about the future of heat pumps and their positive impact on the environment. It sees global capacity reaching nearly 2,600 gigawatts by 2030 and cutting the use of dirty fuels nearly in half for heating needs.
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