#refrigerants

[rjzimmerman]

Court upholds Biden-era EPA rule phasing out climate-damaging refrigerant. (Reuters)

Excerpt from this Reuters story:

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected challenges by refrigerant manufacturers to a rule adopted during Democratic President Joe Biden's administration to curtail the use of a potent climate-warming gas used in refrigerators and air conditioners.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected, opens new tab arguments that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's rule governing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) was invalid and that the agency unconstitutionally exercised legislative power by adopting it.

The rule was finalized in July 2023 in order to implement a provision of the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, a 2020 law that calls for reducing the production and consumption of climate-damaging HFCs by 85% by 2036.

To implement the law, the EPA began setting annual “allocations” for each HFC producer and importer based on estimates of their historical market share that gradually would decline over time.

Lawyers for Choice Refrigerants argued that Congress had unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the EPA to set the allowances.

But U.S. Circuit Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, wrote that the AIM Act does not unconstitutionally delegate legislative power to the EPA because it sufficiently constrained the agency's discretion to allocate HFC allowances.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Decomposing 'refrigerants,' a potent greenhouse gas, using industrial waste

A research team has developed a technology to decompose refrigerants, a greenhouse gas 1,300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, using challenging-to-handle industrial waste. Dr. Ryi Shin-kun's team at the Hydrogen Convergence Materials Lab of the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has successfully developed a catalyst from industrial waste known as "red mud," a byproduct of aluminum production. This catalyst can decompose HFC-134a refrigerant, commonly used in household appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators, with an efficiency of 99%. The study is published in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. Red mud is an industrial byproduct remaining after extracting aluminum oxide from the mineral bauxite. It contains oxides of iron, aluminum, silicon, and other elements, giving it a red color. More than 200,000 tons are produced annually.

Read more.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

At this year’s UN Cop28 climate summit the issue of air conditioning will be at the forefront of discussions as some of the world’s largest economies have signed up to the first ever global cooling pledge, led by the UN environment programme.

So far, more than 50 signatories have signed on to cut their cooling emissions by 68% by 2050.

India, however, is not expected to join. The country’s market for ACs is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the world. Higher incomes, rising temperatures in an already hot and humid climate and increasing affordability and access are driving more and more Indians towards buying or renting one as soon as they can afford it – and sometimes even when they cannot.

Between 8% and 10% of the country’s 300m households – home to 1.4 billion people – have an AC, but that number is expected to hit close to 50% by 2037, according to government projections. A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050, India will have more than 1bn ACs in operation.

It could have significant implications for the global effort to keep temperature rises within 1.5C. Around the world, ACs are still largely inefficient and use a huge amount of electricity mostly generated by fossil fuels.

En masse, they can drive up outside temperatures as they pump out heat from indoors to outdoors. They contain chemical refrigerants which, if leaked, can be almost 1,500 times more environmentally destructive than CO2.

The vast amount of electricity that India’s growing number of ACs will require presents a significant challenge. Already during peak summertime hours, ACs have accounted for 40% to 60% of total power demand in the cities of Delhi and Mumbai.

According to the IEA, by 2050, the amount of power India consumes solely for air conditioning is expected to exceed the total power consumption of all of Africa.

Most of this electricity is produced by burning coal, and while India’s capacity from renewables such as solar power is expanding, it is happening nowhere near as fast as the growth of the AC market, which will soon outpace all other household appliances.

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[indizombie]

Dirty fuel oil widely used to generate electricity in Mexico should be completely banned, Mexican scientist Mario Molina said, citing its high sulfur content as a danger to both human health and the earth’s atmosphere. The oil, a byproduct of the refining process, is especially prevalent in Mexico due to the inability of its aging refineries to efficiently process the country’s heavy crude. Molina is a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his role in revealing threats to the planet’s protective ozone layer from freons, commonly found in spray cans and refrigerants.

David Alire Garcia, ‘Nobel-winning Mexican scientist calls for complete ban on fuel oil’, Reuters

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Knowable Magazine:

It was a monumental day for the environmental movement more than 30 years ago when all 198 countries in the world agreed on something for the first and only time ever. They signed on to the Montreal Protocol, making a pact to phase out a roster of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer. Chief among these were the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons used by the cooling and refrigeration industry. Alternatives, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were quickly found.

But in recent years, scientists have come to realize that the Montreal Protocol of 1987 might have traded an immediate problem for a long-term one. Though HFCs don’t cause the same damage to the ozone layer as CFCs do, the chemicals have warming potentials hundreds to thousands of times higher than that of CO2 — making their growing global use a cause for concern.

The 20th-century industrial revolution saw a major boom in the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry in Europe and North America. Now, as developing nations boost their economies, countries such as China, India and Nigeria are seeing skyrocketing demand for these appliances.

About 3.6 billion cooling appliances — for cooling buildings and refrigerating food and other items such as medicines — are in use today, according to a 2020 report by the United Nations Environment Program; the number is expected to leap to 9.5 billion by 2050. What’s more, that figure would be a staggering 14 billion if everyone who needed cooling services could acquire them, according to one estimate.

[rjzimmerman]

E.P.A. to Announce Sharp Limits on Powerful Greenhouse Gases

The Biden administration is moving quickly to limit hydrofluorocarbons, the Earth-warming chemicals used in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday moved to sharply cut down on the use and production of powerful greenhouse gases used in refrigeration and air-conditioning, part of the Biden administration’s larger strategy of trying to slow the pace of global warming.

The first significant step taken by the E.P.A. under President Biden to curb climate change, the proposed regulation focuses on hydrofluorocarbons, a class of man-made chemicals that is thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet.

Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said the agency aimed to reduce the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons in the United States by 85 percent over the next 15 years.

The move is important because it will be the first time the federal government has set national limits on HFCs, which were used to replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in the 1980s but have turned out to be a significant driver of global warming.  More than a dozen states have either banned HFCs or are formulating some restrictions.

The E.P.A.’s action is backed by both environmental groups and the business community, which jointly championed bipartisan legislation passed by Congress in December to tackle HFCs.

But the speed  with which the E.P.A. crafted language and moved forward with the proposed regulation is unusual and underscores the urgency that the Biden administration is placing on climate change, said Francis Dietz, vice president for public affairs at the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group.

In communicating the gains it says will be realized by tackling climate change, the E.P.A. estimated that the HFC rule would result in $283.9 billion in health and environmental benefits by the middle of the century.

As part of a sweeping coronavirus relief bill, Congress last year approved language directing the E.P.A. to curb HFCs. The E.P.A. estimates that, from 2022 to 2050, the rule will eliminate the equivalent of 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about three years’ worth of emissions from America’s power sector.

[rjzimmerman]

US Blocks Illegal Imports of Climate Damaging Refrigerants With New Rules - Inside Climate News

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Just weeks after the Environmental Protection Agency began enforcing strict new limits on the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioning equipment, the agency said it has blocked illegal imports of the harmful chemicals equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning 1.2 million barrels of oil.

Starting Jan. 1, U.S. chemical and equipment manufacturers were required to begin phasing down production and consumption of climate-damaging HFCs as mandated by the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act, which was enacted in December 2020.

The rule will reduce domestic production and consumption of HFCs by 85 percent over the next 14 years and brings the U.S. into compliance with an international agreement known as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. The agreement is expected to prevent up to 0.5 Celsius of climate warming by 2100 through requiring manufacturers to use chemical refrigerants that are less damaging to the climate.

The HFC regulation places strict limits on the volume of HFCs that individual companies can produce or import. A key part of the rule is robust enforcement by an interagency task force that includes the EPA, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other agencies to ensure that U.S. companies do not violate the rule by exceeding their limits with additional, illegal imports.

Over the past 10 weeks, the agencies have prevented illegal HFC shipments equivalent to approximately 530,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions, the EPA said in a press release on Tuesday.