GlassPoint Solar won a Platts Global Energy Commercial Technology of the Year award in its Leading Technologies category. Not bad for a company that introduced its first commercial project this year. Even more interesting for a solar company, considering that Platts is a leading publisher for the fossil fuels industry.

Then again GlassPoint isn’t your everyday solar company that uses solar energy to produce electricity, or even heat for buildings. The company uses concentrated solar power to superheat water into steam for thermal enhanced oil recovery.

Thermal enhanced oil recovery involves injecting high-pressure steam into an oil well, heating a deposit cavity up and freeing more oil from that cavity. It’s a job that’s traditionally been done using natural gas to heat water into steam.

“For the first time the cost of solar steam is below the cost of gas-fired steam. That’s the core of GlassPoints’ contribution,” said John O'Donnell vice president of Business Development at GlassPoint.

The company’s approach uses glass greenhouses surrounding a reflective trough that concentrates the sun on a liquid filled tube, generating the steam used for the process. Since the steam is used to heat the entire cavity, the intermittency of sunlight is less important than it is to a solar system like a photovoltaic array or a CSP electric system, which respond more quickly to changes in sunlight.

“One of the exciting things about this application is that solar can be the primary fuel. Solar could provide more than half, something like 80 percent of the fuel used,” O’Donnell said. “It reduces the carbon intensity and lowers the lifetime cost of your steam.”

GlassPoint’s system doesn’t reduce the amount of fossil fuel being consumed by other applications like transportation or electricity generation, but it does reduce emissions associated with fossil fuels.

“Here’s an application that immediately reduces emissions associated with that oil,” O’Donnell said. “People don’t understand how significant the emissions associated with this are and what the opportunity is to reduce the cost of steam production.”

The company installed its first system for Berry Petroleum Co. in McKittrick, Calif., in February.

“We’re now in construction of building the first in the Middle East for Oman,” O’Donnell said.

The company already is working on even larger projects, some that would reach into thousands of megawatts, if they were converting steam into electricity.