INDUSTRIAL COOLING
Act now or face the risk I
Mark Hughes, business
development manager, refrigerants, Chemours examines refrigerants with the industrial sector.
t’s a time of rapid change in industrial refrigeration and cooling. Those at the sharp end operating the equipment need to be asking those who are providing new equipment, servicing and maintenance: “How are you going to help me through the transition from high-GWP [Global Warming Potential] HFCs [hydrofl uorocarbons] to lower-GWP refrigerants, with minimal disruption to my business?”
Where are HFCs used?
By far, the largest users of HFCs are in refrigeration and HVAC applications, from commercial refrigeration to air conditioning and heat pumps. They are also used in other applications such as propellants, fi re suppressants and blowing agents for foams. The most common HFCs in use today are of very low toxicity and non-fl ammable. This is why they’ve become very popular in a wide variety of applications in industrial and commercial refrigeration and cooling. However, the Achilles heel of HFCs is that they are, in many cases, powerful global warming gases with thousands of times the GWP of CO2
. This
is only an issue if these gases leak into the atmosphere, but it has been all too common an occurrence in the past.
European Regulations
In January 2015, the F-Gas regulations in Europe were introduced to move the market towards lower-GWP solutions. A cap and phase-down approach was introduced that limits the amount of HFCs that can be placed on the EU market via a quota system, expressed in tonnes of CO2
equivalent. This
quota will be reduced each year resulting in lower availability and higher costs for high-GWP refrigerants such as R404A. The most dramatic cut in quota comes as of January 1, 2018. It should be noted, however, that pre-charged equipment imported from outside the EU (mainly split a/c) which today represents approximately 12% of the quota has already fallen under the quota system as of January 1, 2017. This means that within three years the cooling industry in the EU will have faced a reduction of almost 50% in available quota. This is well before the ban on using products like R404A for service that comes into force in 2020. This presents industry with a signifi cant challenge.
In addition, there is a ban in 2020 (less than three years away) on the installation and servicing of refrigeration equipment containing more than 10kg of refrigerants with a GWP of >2500, which includes common refrigerants such as R404A, and blends used in the past to retrofi t R22 equipment such as R422D.
42 June 2017
Industrial Refrigerants – who is affected? When we refer to ‘industrial’ refrigeration (rather than ‘commercial’), what we are referring to is all refrigeration activities outside of retail and the food service sector. This means any activity within the supply chain, which in food is typically from the farm to the supermarket.
This includes the preparation and processing of food, beverage and dairy goods, the storage of those goods, as well as the transportation of this produce through the supply chain to the supermarket shelves or the food service outlet. But it’s not just about the food chain. Industrial refrigeration includes other industry sectors where the cooling of a product or process takes place. The pharmaceuticals industry, for example, needs to keep manufactured drugs and medicines to strict low temperature levels, otherwise the drugs will deteriorate. Similarly, vaccines and biological samples also require cold storage. In fact, any product manufactured or processed that requires cold storage or requires its temperature to be reduced, is now aff ected by the recent F-Gas Regulations and the phasing down of HFCs. The manufacturing and process industries are also vitally important to the UK economy. These businesses may possess some sort of cooling system, cold storage facility or may have several critical production scenarios in which heat needs to be removed from the process such as coolants and cutting fl uids. In order to maintain a sustainable and uninterrupted supply chain, contractors, equipment suppliers – as well as plant engineers, facilities managers and maintenance managers within end user companies – need to be making plans now about which refrigerants they should be using in the future. They need to be aware of the legislation, including which refrigerants they are currently using and how the recent legislation impinges on what they are doing. Users of industrial refrigeration should be looking at a transition from the legacy high-GWP refrigerants to the lowest possible GWP alternative, which doesn’t adversely aff ect the performance of their cooling system/equipment or the energy effi ciency of their process.
If you are currently using a high-GWP product, one option is to remove the existing equipment and replace it with kit suitable for use with a lower-GWP alternative. This is, of course, a very capital-intensive solution and curtails the life of equipment that may have many serviceable years of continued operation. In many cases, your existing equipment can be retrofi tted with the latest HFO blends, which is a much lower cost option and is straightforward. Existing equipment that runs on HFCs can be easily retrofi tted to operate on lower-GWP HFO blend refrigerants such as R449A, with little modifi cation required to the equipment. The equipment will operate with a similar cooling capacity as before but improvements in energy effi ciency will result from the changeover – for a medium
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