The climate change implications of manufacturing refrigerants - A calculation of 'production' energy contents of some common refrigerants

Total Equivalent Warming Impact (TEWI) analysis has been shown to be a useful aid to quantifying the climate change effect of potential emissions from the operation of systems that involve the use of greenhouse gases and consume energy, so generating CO2 emissions. It enables these systems to be optimized for minimum global warming impact. In previous studies(1,2,3), the energies required to manufacture the greenhouse gases themselves were not included; by analogy with other chemical manufacturing processes they were assumed to be small in the context of climate change. In the work described here, climate change impacts from the energy used to produce a number of common refrigerant fluids are evaluated. These impacts are compared with the potential impact on global warming from the other components of TEWI: use and disposal of the refrigerants, including direct release into the environment. It is shown that the implications for climate change of the production of traditional refrigerants like ammonia, hydrocarbons or CFC-12 and new refrigerating fluids, such as HFC-134a, are truly insignificant in comparison with other stages of the life cycle of a refrigerator and have no role in TEWI.