Cool Energy, Inc. Awarded $1 Million Grant From DOE for World's Most Efficient Stirling Engine
Boulder, Colorado - July 23, 2013 - Cool Energy, Inc., a clean energy power generation company and sister company of Proton Power, Inc., with headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, announced today that it has been awarded a $1 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant form the U.S. Department of Energy. The grant will support a program to demonstrate electricity generation from untapped heat from distributed geothermal sources. The grant will allow Cool Energy to build and test their first 20 kW prototype Stirling engine to generate electricity from co-produced liquids at oil and gas wells. The recoverable heat in these liquids is currently wasted, as is the potentially valuable heat from pumps and compressors, as well as geothermal heat from non-producing wells.
"If widely deployed in appropriate heat recovery sectors, our power generation technology could replace up to 300 fossil fuel power plants,” said Sam Weaver, Jr., CEO of Cool Energy. “Given recent advances in our designs, there is an opportunity for electricity cost savings and emissions reductions in oil and gas fields, which have significant thermal energy sources all around them. This is the most important increase in output capacity that Cool Energy has undertaken since beginning to develop Stirling engines for waste heat recovery six years ago.”
The “GeoHeart Engine” will convert heat from liquids extracted from the ground to make zero-emissions energy. The Cool Energy technology will recapture energy from liquids that are in the temperature range 100C – 200C. This temperature is ideally suited for the company’s low temperature waste heat recovery (WHR) system. The heat can be safely and efficiently converted into electricity that can be used onsite to offset the power needed for the operation of the wells, or sold to the local utility and added directly into the power grid. This approach to oilfield power production will prevent some of the carbon emissions generated from these activities. Cool Energy will also study another application of the GeoHeart Engine, using spent wells that are no longer producing petroleum to heat fluids to make emissions-free electricity.
About Cool Energy
Cool Energy is a privately-held power conversion equipment corporation based in Boulder, Colorado. The company was founded in 2006 to develop a thermal-to-electricity power generation system for converting waste heat from engines and industrial processes into clean electricity. The company has received grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office, and has 10 patents awarded or pending.
More information is available at www.CoolEnergy.com.