Green carbon-based heating could be commercially available within five years

In fact, engineers at the university have already entered a technical partnership with Centro Richerche Fiat  (Fiat Central Research), part of the Fiat group, to develop and demonstrate the technology. A spin-off company, Sorption Energy Ltd, is also being set up by Warwick Ventures, the university’s technology transfer office, and H2O Venture Partners.

The new company will initially use its new patent pending technology to focus on greener heating and hot water systems for houses and air conditioning for cars.

Lead researcher on the project, University of Warwick’s Professor Bob Critoph explained the timescales involved in getting the technology into commercial production: “From investment in the technology to having a car air conditioning system would take two-and-a-half years, but the time to appear in production cars would be longer and depends on the car manufacturers. 

“The gas heat pump could be ready for sale four years from starting the development programme.”

Absorption technology – that uses heat from a gas flame or engine waste heat to power a closed system containing only active carbon and refrigerant – has long been seen as a more efficient way to drive heat pumps or air conditioning.

A process which alternately heats and cools the carbon can be used to extract heat from the outside air and put it into radiators or hot water tanks or, in the case of air conditioning, it extracts the heat from the inside of the car.

Until now, the big problem with the technology has been its size – it needed to be roughly 300 litres in volume for a car air conditioner and even bigger for a domestic heat pump.

The big breakthrough at the University of Warwick has been to miniaturise the technology, creating adsorption-based equipment that is up to 20 times smaller than was previously possible.

The researchers claim their new technology will create heat pumps that will reduce domestic fuel bills and CO2 emissions by more than 30 per cent, compared to even the best condensing boiler.

In car air conditioning systems, it is expected to reduce both fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by nearly five per cent.

Professor Critoph said: “My team has been working on these developments for several years, supported by grants totalling over £2.5million. The technology is now ready for commercialisation and we are very excited by the opportunities which are developing. It is particularly pleasing that the technology will significantly help reduce CO2 emissions.”

Earlier this week supermarket Sainsbury's announced that it intended to cut its carbon footprint by around a third by replacing all of its fridges that currently run on HFCs and HCFCs – so-called ‘F-gases’ - with devices that use carbon dioxide by 2030.

Although the new fridges will emit some CO2, the supermarket claims it will be less harmful overall than the damage caused by the emission of the F-gases, which have a global warming potential of 2,000 to 3,000 times that of a similar quantity of CO2.

"Fridges are by far the biggest source of CO2 emissions in any supermarket, through both the energy required to power them and the refrigerants themselves. If all supermarkets in the UK switched to this sort of refrigeration, the reduction in CO2 emissions would amount to around two million tonnes a year," said chief executive Justin King.

Commenting on the Sainbury’s announcement Professor Critoph said: “The Sainsbury's system is certainly welcome in that the refrigerant used is 'green' (as is ours), but they still use electricity to drive the system, whereas ours uses heat.”