The quest of societies to move forward from burning fossil fuels for heat is well noted. So too is the opportunity to push heat around a large city in pipes under the streets thereby avoiding individual heating solutions in each building.

The need to create more sustainable city environments is well known. Less well known is that a huge portion of the air quality problems we experience in cities is not from transport but from heating. Burning gas is incredibly convenient and relatively low cost considering the complex infrastructure but it is incompatible with future living.

Heat pumps whilst increasingly deployed for smaller, more isolated buildings such as houses, are not the most appropriate way to heat high density city areas. District heating (a network of new pipes under the streets) can bring all the heating and hot water needed for any building. Although traditionally connected to waste heat from combustion sources such as waste incineration, cleaner sources are now  being used which harness ambient heat sources such as rivers and the seas.

Making this as simple to deploy in a busy city centre is where B Neatpumps comes in. Over several decades, Star Refrigeration have advocated for the use of heat pumps drawing heat from rivers and a few of these have been successfully deployed but one major barrier has been the need for land next to the rivers which is often in short supply or too valuable. Malin Group and Star have identified and progressed a concept to put the heat pumps on barges on the river. Scottish Enterprise launched their Can Do Innovation call in 2024 to push forward and tackle the barrier to the adoption of amongst other things clean heat. Malin and Star Refrigeration combined their knowledge and the B-Neatpump was born. A Barge based Natural working fluid heat pump, the B-Neatpump could be deployed in dozens of cities in the UK alone. 

Floating the heat pump and water abstraction equipment avoids jostling for busy prime land and delivers a simpler more modular solution allowing cities to harness what is already right on their doorstep- ambient heat.