Refrigerant Management
A-Gas Group Commercial Director, Ken Logan, explains how reclaiming refrigerant, end-of-life destruction and carbon offsets all have a role to play in refrigerant management.
A-Gas Group Commercial Director, Ken Logan, explains how reclaiming refrigerant, end-of-life destruction and carbon offsets all have a role to play in refrigerant management.
At A-Gas our twin aims to supply the lowest global warming refrigerants and promote the further uptake of refrigerant lifecycle management tie in with Project Drawdown – an initiative launched in the US by scientists and environmentalists to highlight 100 solutions mankind can implement to slow down global warming.
A-Gas supports the aims of Project Drawdown and refrigerant management as one of the key solutions highlighted by the initiative. Refrigerant management has an important role to play as we look to halt the effects of climate change. More than that we believe that effective refrigerant management is part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Reclaimed Refrigerant
At the heart of this is the use of reclaimed gases. Refrigerants sent to A-Gas reprocessing centres undergo chemical analysis, are cleaned of contaminants and pass through our reclamation and separation plant to create a product that matches the virgin refrigerant specification. This refrigerant becomes fully reclaimed product and is returned to the market in line with the AHRI 700 standard.
Reclaimed refrigerant is quota-free and gases saved from disposal and returned to use also reduce raw material usage, energy consumption and unnecessary transport normally associated with virgin production.
On-Site Recovery Service
A-Gas Rapid Recovery, the F-Gas compliant on-site recovery service, is a good example of how refrigerant recovery can be made easy. Large quantities of refrigerant can be removed swiftly and safely by our mobile A-Gas Rapid Recovery teams before being transported to our reprocessing centres.
Another aspect of effective refrigerant management is dealing with refrigerants that have reached the end of their useful lives. While end-of-life recovery for destruction does take place across Europe, unless it is incentivised, destruction rates will remain low and most unusable refrigerant may well be vented illegally into the atmosphere. This is likely to become a bigger problem when certain refrigerants are finally phased out or when demand no longer exists.
To further expand our services in dealing with the destruction of high global warming refrigerants unfit for further use A-Gas bought the entire business and intellectual property of Salience Solutions, renaming this as A-Gas PyroPlas. This acquisition adds to our existing in-house destruction capability through the addition of PyroPlas® plasma arc destruction technology for fluorocarbon and non-fluorocarbon gases.
A-Gas has also acquired the Japanese company FUSO. The business offers the reclamation and destruction of refrigerants to customers on a national basis in Japan through a network of regional offices and key processing sites in Tokyo.
Carbon Offsets
The reclamation and destruction of refrigerants form part of a flourishing carbon offset market in the US. The offsets are generated by displacing the production of virgin refrigerants or, in some cases, the permanent removal of legacy CFC refrigerants through destruction.
The offsets are verified by independent carbon registries. This pragmatic environmental solution – currently not adopted in the UK and across Europe – is speeding up the phase down of greater amounts of ozone depleting and high global warming refrigerants and importantly providing an incentive to properly dispose of end-of-life gases.
Greater amounts of high global warming refrigerants need to be lifecycle managed than ever before and we are also recovering and re-using larger quantities of gases – especially in the UK. I have no doubt that regulators have a greater role to play in helping to shape the future of our planet by incentivising options for the reuse of refrigerants and facilitating the safe environmental disposal of these gases when they can no longer be used.
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A‑Gas is the world leader in the supply and lifecycle management of refrigerants and associated products and services.
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