From left: Deepak Pahwa, chairman of Pahwa Group and managing director of Bry-Air (Asia), and Vijay Chaudhry, CEO of Bry-Air (Asia)
NMP recovery involves reclaiming N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), a solvent widely used in industrial applications like lithium-ion battery production. And with its air-to-water generation technology, the company aims to address water scarcity while participating in the green hydrogen revolution.
“In green hydrogen, solar power is harnessed to make it green. But the more important part is that you need to have water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. Solar resource-rich areas like Rajasthan face acute water scarcity,” Deepak Pahwa, chairman of Pahwa Group and managing director of Bry-Air. ” So, water is to be extracted from the atmosphere and that’s the technology we are now getting into. We call water so generated ‘white water,’ as the system to harness water from the atmosphere is also powered by solar power.”
Pahwa said Bry-Air is set to work on a similar project on another continent soon.
“It’s the first project of this type for green hydrogen in a very desert area. The area has a high solar power potential but is water-stressed. That’s where we have been shortlisted as one of the two likely candidates. We have undertaken the prototype system,” explained Pahwa. “When the prototype is up and running, 500 units of the system will be installed to produce huge quantity of hydrogen. Each solution is $2 million. So the total requirement is worth about a billion dollars for this project alone.”
Pahwa said this is just the beginning, noting that there is significant opportunity in this space as harnessing pure water from the atmosphere is cheaper than converting seawater into pure water. Bry-Air is also developing solutions to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere.
“There are two areas of carbon capture. One is post combustion. That’s been around for a while, but the new thing coming up in the world now is to directly capture carbon from the atmosphere. We are developing some good solutions to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere,” said Pahwa. “We, ourselves, are putting up a 5 ton per year plant as a demo unit in our factory. We are doing it more as a technology provider. We will be involved in the adsorption side, which is critical to the whole project. And we are putting in a lot of research and development in that area.”
In the field of dehumidification, Bry-Air is set to break new ground in energy efficiency, reaching rotor regeneration temperatures of 80 C, which significantly reduces the operational cost of running a dehumidifier. It has also developed low-dew-point dehumidifiers for lithium-ion cell manufacturing worldwide.
Bry-Air, a flagship company of the Pahwa Group, was founded in 1964 in the USA by Art Harms as an offshoot of Bryant, a division of Carrier Corp. that manufactured desiccant-based dehumidifiers. Today, Bry-Air is a global leader in adsorption-based technologies with continuous advancements in material science. The company has secured 84 patents and filed seven more in October 2024 alone for its future technologies.
Bry-Air operates in over 80 countries, with subsidiaries in China, Malaysia, Brazil, Nigeria, and Switzerland, and an associate plant in the United States. It also maintains representative offices across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America, with 13 manufacturing facilities and a workforce of over 1,500 employees across the Pahwa Group, including 800 in Bry-Air.
