Forge Campus leases 100K square feet to steam startup

LOVELAND — The Forge Campus in Loveland has signed an anchor tenant to take much of the space in Building B previously occupied by Lightning eMotors Inc.

The Forge Campus, at one time the Hewlett-Packard Co. facility in Loveland, has been attracting manufacturing and technology companies to work in a collaborative environment.

AtmosZero Inc., a company operating from Colorado State University’s Powerhouse facility at 430 N. College Ave. in Fort Collins, will maintain its presence at the Powerhouse but has leased about 100,000 square feet of space in the Forge. At the Forge, it will produce its pilot steam boiler using heat pump technology. The pilot boiler will then be installed at New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc. to reduce the carbon impact of its brewing operations. Subsequent products will be created for other industries around the country.

Jay Dokter, co-owner of the Forge, said the ownership team is excited about AtmosZero because of how it fits with what the Forge tries to be.

“It’s a competent team. We’ve met with several of the executives, and they’re a sharp, sharp group of people. Their experience is strong and that caliber of people gets us excited. The more we can up the skill, the talent, the better for the entire campus.”

The company will occupy space recently vacated by the Lightning eMotors space in Building B. Some of Lightning’s space is Building A remains under lease to Gillig LLC, which took over what remains of Lightning’s operations.

AtmosZero has leased, effective this month, all the remaining space in Building B except for Grimm Brothers Brewery and the Forge event space adjacent to Grimm.

“We also love working with CSU,” Dokter said. “We’ll work with CSU wherever we can, and this technology was born at CSU.

“This is a massive project; it isn’t just developing a small product. It will be a massive effort (to power) big commercial companies,” Dokter said.

AtmosZero is working to revolutionize heating water for steam. “Three-fourths of industrial emissions come from processed heat, and half of that is in the production of steam” to drive industrial processes,” Addison Stark, CEO of AtmosZero told BizWest.

AtmosZero will retain its space at the Powerhouse in order to maintain its relationship with CSU but use the Forge Campus to ramp up its production, which includes expanding its workforce from about 23 to 40 over the coming 18 months.

on Facebook on LinkedIn