At scale, Barocal’s technology will significantly reduce heating and cooling sector emissions through efficiency gains and the avoidance of gas refrigerants, the company said. The HVAC sector is responsible for about 15% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions — a far higher proportion than the aviation sector, which gets more public attention, the press release said. Cooling alone accounted for more than four gigatons of CO₂ equivalents in 2022, and demand is expected to triple by 2050.

Xavier Moya, an expert in caloric materials and systems, founded Barocal in 2019 to commercialize a research breakthrough. While many caloric materials are limited by costs, degradation, or fatigue, Moya discovered a way to demonstrate unprecedented performance in barocaloric materials — hence the company’s name. Barocaloric materials use pressure-driven phase transitions to generate large temperature changes. Based on this discovery, Moya’s team developed and patented a heating and cooling platform technology. It is designed to be more efficient and less expensive than traditional vapor-compression systems that rely on climate-damaging gas refrigerants to power air conditioning units, Barocal’s press release said.

“Heating and cooling have always been the elephant in the room when it comes to emissions, and ours is a set of materials that could change history,” Moya said.