Energy Efficient Industrial Water Heaters Reduce CO2 Emissions and Company Now Primed For Further Ramp-Up in U.S. Sales
Montreal, May 23, 2012 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Sofame Technologies Inc. (
CVE:SDW) (PINK:SFMGF), a leading manufacturer of environmentally efficient industrial water heaters and cost-effective heat recovery systems for traditional boilers, has invested over twenty-five years developing its leading technology and proving it in the field. The technology is called "direct contact", and its advantage is that it captures all the heat contained in a boiler's combustion gases.
This thermal energy would normally be exhausted into the atmosphere from a regular boiler. Sofame uses the direct contact technology to engineer and manufacture environmentally efficient industrial water heaters and cost-effective waste heat recovery systems for traditional boilers. Sofame's systems guarantee an instantaneous fuel-to-water efficiency between 91% and 96.7%, whereas a regular boiler's efficiency varies from as low as 50% to 82%. The path has been long and difficult, but John Gocek, Sofame's determined if not incorrigible President and CEO, believes that Sofame is about to make a breakthrough.
Sofame is based in Montreal and has sold several systems in France, but it quietly entered the U.S. industrial energy efficiency market space in 2007. By signing up manufacturers' representatives on the east coast, Sofame extended its net sales without incurring major costs. It took two years to generate the first results, but today two multinational food processors, based in Battle Creek, MI, and Hershey, PA, are using Sofame Percotherm(R) systems to reduce fuel costs and CO2 emissions by over 10%. Two hospitals in New Jersey and Maine have purchased Sofame's equipment. Two universities, one in Colorado and one in Princeton, NJ, have also used Sofame engineering and equipment to cut fuel costs and CO2 emission by about 10%. These environmental investments help mitigate climate change, but they also offer a handsome dividend in the form of fuel cost reduction, so financial payback periods are typically less than three years. In the case of large gas consumers (over $1,000,000 per year at current prices), payback can be closer to one year. Sofame's newest customer is Butterball, the largest supplier of turkey products in the United States.
According to John Gocek, "The financial and environmental imperatives of major natural gas users are beginning to align to Sofame's benefit. There is nothing wrong with taking advantage of a great opportunity to improve efficiency (i.e., make money), while directly reducing carbon footprints in a sustainable and cost-effective manner."
The exciting new opportunity for Sofame is the way that direct contact technology has been applied to electric power generation. The U.S. electricity market is the world's largest, comprising one-fifth of both global demand and power plant capacity. With natural gas prices at historic lows compared to all other fuels, many utilities are converting to gas-fired turbines which are about 40% efficient. In a well-run power plant generating electricity, steam and cooling for air conditioning, co-generation brings efficiency up to 70%. Sofame can take that number up to 99% if there is a need and a use for hot water at 135ºF. The potential additional fuel savings of 29% represent a corresponding reduction in CO2 emissions. Today, institutions, universities, hospitals and industrial plants are also opting to generate their own electricity due to the availability of clean-firing gas turbines. This trend led Siemens and Alstom to build gas turbine plants in the United States to meet the demand. Since the demand for electricity is ever on the rise, Sofame's direct contact heat recovery technology can cost-effectively help reduce the impact on the atmosphere.
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Contact
Stone Communication Services
Jason Stone
Franca Pranovi
TEL: +1-416-867-2526
EMAL: jasons@stoneco.com
President & CEO
John Gocek
TEL: +1-514-523-6545 x200
WEB: www.sofame.com
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