GEA Wins Order for Three Ammonia Heat Pumps Totaling 9 MW
The three Blu-Red Fusion systems will heat process water from 165 to 195 degrees F, drawing on a heat source that leaves at 42 F. GEA puts the heating COP at 2.96 and the emissions cut at 4,800 metric tons of CO2e a year.
GEA has won an order for three integrated high-temperature ammonia heat pump systems with a combined heating capacity of 9 MW, or 30,716 MBH, German Robledo, the company's North American industrial heat pump sales manager, said in a LinkedIn post. The systems will heat process water from 165 to 195 degrees F at a heating coefficient of performance of 2.96, measured with the heat source leaving at 42 F. GEA estimates the installation will cut 4,800 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions a year.
NaturalRefrigerants.com, which reported the order Nov. 9, placed the project in North Carolina. Robledo's post gives neither the state nor the customer, and GEA had not published a release on the project by that date.
"As manufacturers continue their decarbonization journeys, projects like this demonstrate that industrial heat pumps are no longer a future solution," Robledo wrote. "They are delivering real-world results today at scale."
A Chiller Stage Under a Heat Pump Stage
The order uses GEA's Blu-Red Fusion platform, which Robledo described as combining screw and reciprocating compressors in a two-stage configuration. GEA's product page explains the arrangement: a Blu chiller runs the low stage, a Red heat pump runs the high stage, and a single ammonia-to-ammonia cascade heat exchanger joins two separate refrigerant circuits, which the company says keeps total charge down. The page lists simultaneous cooling and heating as the standard operating mode, with the option to shut off the heat pump stage and run the chiller alone when no heat is needed.
The 42 F source figure falls inside the 5 to 59 F secondary refrigerant outlet range GEA publishes for the platform's chiller side, and the 195 F delivery sits under its 203 F ceiling for supply water. Capacity is the outlier. GEA's page lists a heating range of about 275 to 2,400 kW per unit, while 9 MW split evenly across three systems comes to 3 MW apiece. The same page says new compressor models have raised the platform's capacity and temperature range, without giving updated figures.
Why This Matters to Contractors
Three Blu-Red Fusion systems at 9 MW land at roughly four and a half times the 2,000 kW ceiling of the FRICK HeatPAC that Johnson Controls launched last week for 190 F process water, so the two ammonia packages now on offer in North America cover different ends of the plant-size range. GEA's stated savings work out to about 530 metric tons of CO2e a year per megawatt of heating, a figure an owner can set against a boiler replacement case before an engineer has sized anything.
Sources
- German Robledo, GEA, LinkedIn post on a 9 MW industrial heat pump award, November 2026. linkedin.com
- Jae O. Haroldsen, "GEA Secures 9MW Ammonia Heat Pump Project in North Carolina," NaturalRefrigerants.com, Nov. 9, 2026. naturalrefrigerants.com
- GEA, "GEA Blu-Red Fusion," product page. gea.com