Energy Kinetics Introduces B100 Compatible Boilers

HeatingHelp

B100 Heating is Here

The past year saw significant leaps in the heating systems available with the ability to be powered by the lowest carbon liquid heating fuel, B-100. Energy Kinetics, a boiler and integrated systems manufacturer from Lebanon, NJ, announced the 100% biodiesel blend listing for their complete line of residential and commercial heat and hot water boilers. This followed the necessary preliminary step of having B100 burners. During the past 12 months, both R. W. Beckett Corp. and Carlin Combustion Technology launched their respective lines of burners rated by UL to operate on 100% biodiesel, as well as blends of biodiesel and fuel oil. Years of collaboration with these industry partners, along with NORA’s R&D division based in Plainview, NY, enabled the development and deployment of these burners on Energy Kinetics B100 boilers.

Read the full story here.

Roger

Thank you to everyone on our team and in the industry for the tremendous research, development, field trials, standards development, and more that all made the broad application of biofuels (B100) for cold climate heating possible. This offers a near term pathway to advance decarbonization, with results that extend all the way up to affordable Net Zero Carbon Home opportunities. These fuels and the applications have made remarkable advancements in the last two decades, and those successes continue to accelerate. For example, our B100 listed boilers can run with No. 2 fuel oil through 100% biodiesel (B100) without any burner adjustments through fuel transitions.
Thank you,
Roger

DanHolohan

Congratulations!

Mad Dog_2

Neato!  Mad Dog 🐕 

CLamb

They can run on either BioFuel or a mix of BioFuel and petroleum fuel. I wonder if they will need re-adjustment when switching from one fuel to another.

Roger

Good question, @CLamb . The UL Listing test includes changing from B100 back down to straight fuel oil with no adjustments. Our boilers pass without issue and in reality, the CO2 levels are very close to the same. We have linked a NORA video of burner live firing biofuel/heating oil transitions in a clear quartz cylinder on our website if you want to take a look.
Best,
Roger

Erin Holohan Haskell

Congratulations to the Energy Kinetics team on this impressive and groundbreaking product development!

WMno57

I'm looking out my home office window at a soybean field right now. This helps our local economy, and it's sustainable.
https://www.fb.org/topic/renewable-fuels-standard
Thank you @Roger.

WMno57

Today might be a good day to buy Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)
https://www.adm.com/en-us/products-services/industrial-biosolutions/products/biodiesel/

BennyV

Bioheat is interesting, but I don't see it being widespread. I doubt it can compete economically against heat pumps even if sustainable sources of biofuels can be found at scale. I've seen almost nothing about biopropane, which should be relatively easy to synthesize compared to biodiesel, and is a better backup fuel for heat pumps than bioheat, which requires all the same bulky, high-maintenance equipment as traditional petroleum distillate fuel oil. Plus, heat pumps keep getting better, many of them can now be used with electric strip backup that just never runs throughout the Northeastern US.

Steamhead

@BennyV , given that the power grid is not up to the task of moving all the electricity heat pumps would require, Bioheat is looking real good. Plus, you can run a Bioheat boiler from a small standby generator. Not so with a heat pump.

Roger

@BennyV , thank you for your comments.
I feel we need to take a "all in" approach and pursue different ways to use our natural resources wisely. That includes assessing the cost to operate, the source efficiency (how much energy is used to produce and deliver fuel to the home and to generate electricity and deliver that to the home), and environmental impacts (what are the full fuel cycle emissions like CO2 and particulates).
We all also know that fuel prices vary, so as consumers, what makes sense today may not make sense in a year or 5 years. For example, New England residential electricity prices averaged over $0.31/kWh a year ago - that's the equivalent of $12.60/gallon of heating oil, and $9.11/therm for natural gas. Since the price of electricity in these examples is 3x higher than oilheat and 5x higher than natural gas, heat pumps will have a difficult time competing on the cost to operate during New England winters. From that simple cost perspective (and from a reliability in cold weather perspective), it makes sense to have a boiler or furnace in addition to a heat pump so it's an easy decision on which to operate. And with biofuels, the environmental impact gap closes or is even eliminated in cold weather as well.
For reference last year over 4 billion gallons of biofuel were produced, up from 3 billion gallons the year before. Bioheat fuel is uniquely well suited to homes that have oilheat.
Roger