Oil-free, as a service: how JustAir is rethinking compressed air with Tamturbo

Compressed air is one of the most expensive utilities in industrial production. Rising energy costs and stricter clean air standards are forcing a closer look at a system that was once bought on price and forgotten. Few people have watched that shift from a closer vantage point than Christiaan Lybaert, former president of Atlas Copco’s global Oil-free Air division and founder of JustAir BV, a company that has made Tamturbo a key part of its oil-free service offering.

From background utility to strategic cost

Compressed air is involved in more than 70 percent of all manufacturing activities worldwide. It powers tools, drives automation, controls valves, and keeps production lines moving — and for most of that time, it was treated accordingly: bought on price, maintained when something broke, and rarely questioned. That is becoming harder to sustain. For large industrial compressors, energy alone accounts for 75 to 80 percent of the total lifetime cost. Maintenance adds another 12 to 15 percent. The purchase price, the number that still drives most procurement decisions, is typically just five to seven percent of what the system will actually cost over its full service life.

This is not a marginal gap. A compressor that looks affordable on a quote can easily cost six figures more over a 20-year lifespan if its efficiency is even a few percentage points lower than an alternative. For companies under pressure to reduce energy costs, that arithmetic has started to matter.

The cost of contaminated air

One cubic metre of untreated compressed air can contain close to 200 million particles and contaminants. In food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and medical devices, where compressed air contacts the product, the consequences are severe: product recalls, facility shutdowns, and in some cases direct harm to end consumers. ISO 8573-1 sets internationally recognised purity classes defining allowable limits for particles, moisture, and oil. The most stringent classes call for oil content at or near zero, and what was once a specialist requirement is becoming a baseline expectation across a much wider range of manufacturing.

Buyers want a system that is clean, efficient, and reliable over a long service life. These are no longer niche requirements.

The view from the field

Few people are better placed to read this market than Christiaan Lybaert.

His career in compressed air spans more than 30 years. It began at Atlas Copco, one of the world’s largest compressed air manufacturers, where he became president of the global oil-free division. That experience gives him a deep understanding of oil-free technology and how it performs in real industrial conditions over time.

Today he runs JustAir BV, a Belgian company he founded around the conviction that the compressed air industry needed a fundamentally different approach. JustAir offers air as a service: customers pay for the compressed air they actually use, without the capital investment of owning the equipment. JustAir takes on the full installation, from the compressor to the piping and distribution network, along with the performance guarantee and long-term responsibility for the system.

To make that model work, the technology has to perform over time, not just on the day it ships. JustAir represents a few carefully selected brands across different technologies, and every assessment starts from the customer’s actual application and load profile. The right compressor depends on what that profile actually requires. For a system that has to run reliably for years, there is no room for optimistic spec sheet arithmetic.

What convinces a customer, in his experience, comes down to two things: uptime and total cost of ownership. The machine has to be reliable, and the economics have to hold across the full service life. Purchase price still drives many procurement decisions, but the customers who look at the full picture reach different conclusions.

For customers with stable, high air demand, where the compressor runs in its optimal capacity range and efficiency is measured over years rather than days, Christiaan’s calculations consistently point to Tamturbo.

Why oil-free means what it says

Tamturbo was founded in Tampere, Finland in 2010 with one conviction: that the industry needed a genuinely oil-free design, not a compromise. The first machines reached the market in 2017.

Traditional oil-free screw compressors address contamination risk by removing oil from the compression process, but they introduce a different challenge in demanding applications. They rely on coated rotors to maintain internal clearances, and in high-load, continuous operation, those coatings can degrade over time. Internal leakage increases, air output drops, and the machine requires steadily more energy to deliver the same result.

“The numbers on a spec sheet are measured at optimal conditions on day one. What changes them in practice is how the machine is loaded – and for a dry screw, how the rotor coating holds up over years of continuous operation.”  

Tamturbo’s Touch-Free™ technology takes a different approach. Active Magnetic Bearings suspend the rotors entirely without physical contact. There is no friction, no wear, and no coating to degrade over time. The Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor operates efficiently across the full load range, and the integrated Variable Speed Drive adjusts output continuously to match actual demand. The result is a machine designed to hold its performance throughout its service life and to deliver ISO 8573-1 Class Zero air as standard, not just at commissioning. A typical installation is up and running within a day.

For Christiaan, this is not a specification to highlight in a sales brochure. It is what makes the machine viable for a service model built on long-term performance guarantees: consistent air quality, predictable energy costs, remote monitoring that flags any deviation before it becomes a problem, and no unexpected maintenance bills halfway through a contract.

“Tamturbo is the compressor of the future. It has all the benefits for being sustainable: cost-effective, energy efficient, and very environmentally friendly.”

Justair has more than twelve turbomachines is the field, across a handful of customers in Belgium and France. For continuous operation at sustained load, the economics are concrete: energy efficiency typically around 15 percent better than dry screw, maintenance costs at roughly half, and a return on investment of between one and four years. All installations run on Tamturbo’s Carefree service program, which means customers carry no unexpected repair costs. Feedback from those running the machines has been positive, and the cooperation with Tamturbo as a manufacturer has made the service model viable in practice.

He is realistic about the road ahead. Not every buyer has moved beyond purchase price, and changing habits in a mature industry never happens overnight. But the trend is clear: cleaner air, tighter efficiency requirements, and greater accountability for total cost. And once they make the switch, they tend not to look back.