The industry is at an inflection point: customers and regulators demand urgent climate action, end users expect performance and reliability, and service providers need continuity.
Throughout its history, mobile HVAC engineers have begrudgingly accepted a difficult tradeoff: prioritize either performance or sustainability to meet regulations. On one side, consumers expect reliable cooling capacity, safety, and efficiency.
On the other hand, regulators and climate advocates demand lower emissions through lower refrigerant global warming potential (GWP). Historically, these goals seemed to be in conflict, and achieving both with a single refrigerant seemed impossible.
Today, that balance is changing. Due to refrigerant innovation, service providers no longer need to choose between meeting sustainability targets and maintaining performance standards. These goals can now be accomplished with existing system architectures and components, minimizing disruption for OEMs, service providers, technicians, and even vehicle owners.
This novel approach is not just product innovation; it’s a strategic rethinking of how to accelerate adoption at commercial scale.
The Adoption Dilemma: Balancing Innovation and Continuity
Over the years, every new mobile refrigerant has entered a marketplace entrenched by an incumbent. Systems, service practices, repair protocols, and recovery infrastructures were developed, optimized, and standardized over decades around products like R-12 and R-134a.
When new alternatives require significant changes in equipment design, technician training, or safety standards, adoption slows due to the barrier, regardless of how promising the performance gain or sustainability profile may be.
This creates a persistent dilemma: the industry needs urgent progress toward decarbonization and lower-GWP solutions, but disruptive transitions carry high costs and risk. For new products to succeed, they must not only meet regulatory and environmental requirements but also integrate seamlessly into existing vehicles.
Innovation with Composite Refrigerants
The solution lies in composite refrigerants, such as R-444A and R-456A, which were developed with direct system replacement in mind. They are designed to minimize system changes and lower barriers to adoption while delivering high performance and significant environmental advantages.
• Performance Parity (or better): R-456A was developed to be a line-on-line performance match with R-134a, delivering identical consumer experience with the incumbent material. The < 50% GWP value of R-456A with 134a performance extends the useful life of 134a vehicles, ensuring refrigerant availability of those vehicles well into the future.
Both blends use R-1234ze(E) as the backbone molecule for enhanced stability, which has not exhibited the polymerization issues shown by R-1234yf when exposed to excess air. “ZE” also minimizes the byproduct trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) upon decomposition, a substance of concern in EU PFAS regulation discussions. R-1234yf decomposes into 100% TFA in contrast.
R-444A was formulated to exceed both performance (>12%) and efficiency (>5%) of R-1234yf. This ensures OEMs and service providers can transition to a GWP<150 refrigerant with confidence, bringing performance back up to 134a levels for improved fuel economy or EV driving range.
R-444A also preserves the overall climate impact of GWP < 10 refrigerants, offering a lifecycle climate performance (LCCP) on the order of incumbent R-1234yf.
• Lower GWP for Push-Button Availability Relief: Refrigerant producers (and consumers) are allocated an amount of carbon equivalents (CO2e) they can produce (or consume). GWP is used to convert a refrigerant’s carbon intensity into CO2e for comparison. As a result, lowering refrigerant GWP enables users to consume more refrigerant for the same allocation quota. For example, R-456A has less than half the GWP of R-134a, meaning consumers can use 2 kg of R-456A for every 1 kg of R-134a they used previously at the same quota.
• Minimal Disruption to Systems and Protocols: Unlike natural refrigerants such as propane (R-290) or carbon dioxide (CO₂), which often require extensive system redesigns due to inherent safety or efficiency opportunities, composite refrigerants can be designed to integrate seamlessly with existing systems — using the same charge amount, oil, and system components, while leaving repair, recovery, and service protocols largely unchanged.
R-456A and R-444A address all sides of the adoption dilemma: they deliver environmental progress, enhance performance, and offer operational continuity as direct system replacements.
The Regulatory Context: Momentum Without Disruption
Under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, more than 140 countries are committed to phasing down high-GWP HFCs. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is actively implementing the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act, which enforces aggressive reductions in HFC use.
A critical part of this framework is the EPA’s Significant New Alternatives Policy (SNAP) program. SNAP evaluates and lists refrigerants based on their environmental and safety performance, assessing flammability, toxicity, and overall climate impact. Products like R-444A and R-456A align with these standards and illustrate how industry and policy can operate in tandem to deliver enhanced consumer experience and assess risk to protect users.
Why Not Natural Refrigerants?
In conversations about the future of mobile HVAC, so-called “natural refrigerants,” like propane and CO₂, have gained interest as long-term solutions due to ultra-low GWP values. However, the practical barriers to adoption are significant, and are the reasons mobile HVAC moved away from them in the 1930s:
- Propane (R-290): While it offers a very low GWP, propane is highly flammable, requiring new safety systems such as a secondary loop and restrictions on charge size, presenting hurdles for widespread adoption. Secondary loop systems carry performance penalties due to increased heat transfer efficiency losses. Component and system development is also expensive and more time-consuming.
- Carbon Dioxide (CO₂ / R-744): CO₂ requires very high operating pressures due to its low critical point, requiring significant redesigns of equipment. While effective in principle as a heat pump fluid (due to its very low boiling point), component development is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
Composite blends provide a novel solution: meaningful reductions in GWP without the component development and system overhauls required by natural refrigerants. Natural refrigerants could have a place in niche applications, but for mass-market adoption across automotive, residential, and light commercial sectors, blends like R-444A and R-456A offer a more practical solution.
It is non-trivial to develop entirely new systems and components, along with their supply chains. To meet the aggressive timelines of the EPA’s AIM Act and Technology Transitions and ensure future readiness for EVs, it is much easier to leverage existing fluorine refrigerant systems and components.
Redefining Leadership in Refrigerant Innovation
Innovation in refrigerants is not just about chemistry. It’s about anticipating the intersection of science, policy, and market adoption to define requirements of a new refrigerant:
- Performance Assurance: Ensuring new refrigerants meet or exceed incumbent materials’ performance and efficiencies.
- Climate Responsibility: Lowering GWP and LCCP while minimizing byproducts like trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), which is increasingly scrutinized in PFAS regulatory discussion.
- Ease of Adoption: Designing blends that minimize system changes and reduce barriers for OEMs, technicians, and end users.
- Global Readiness: Creating solutions that meet regulatory requirements across regions, are EV-ready, and enable global platforms.
Leadership in the refrigerant space is not just about delivering new molecules but delivering confidence and options to the entire value chain.
A Future of Seamless Direct Replacement
“Disruption” in mobile HVAC should be about seamless transitions: solutions that accelerate climate progress while working with the systems and infrastructure automotive engineers have spent decades developing and optimizing.
The mobile HVAC industry is at an inflection point. Customers and regulators demand urgent climate action. End users expect performance and reliability. Service providers need continuity. We believe the best way forward is to meet all of these needs at once.
This is not just the future of cooling; it is the future of leadership in refrigerant sustainability.
Adam Kimmel is Senior Manager Business Development for Orbia Fluor & Energy Materials (OF&EM). He has over 20 years of experience in product marketing, business development, research, and new product development in chemical and mechanical engineering. Kimmel leverages his experience as an engineering SME to work with customers at OF&EM to implement the best thermal management solution for their applications.
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