Industry News
Green lobby urges faster change to CO2 for aircon systems
27th July 2007
The EU should move quickly to replace synthetic cooling systems in car air conditioning systems with a CO2-based approach, says one of the European Transport & Environment lobby group (T&E)’s German members, DUH. As well as concerns over fuel consumption, DUH and other NGOs are concerned about the rising use of aircon systems which use the HFC (hydrofluorocarbon) refrigerant R-134a.
R-134a is 1,300 times more climate warming than CO2, and by 2010, leakage of R-134a from air conditioning systems will contribute more than 4% of vehicles’ total climate change impact, according to a recent MIT study, which noted that with the extra fuel consumption its compressors involve, aircon systems’ total share of automotive global warming emissions rises to 7%. Last month the German car club ADAC calculated how aircon systems can affect fuel consumption, and found that reducing a car’s cabin temperature from 31C to 22C used between 2.47 and 4.15 litres of fuel per 100km.
DUH’s Jürgen Resch said: “The decision for or against CO2 can no longer be left to car companies. It will have a major influence on the climate performance of hundreds of millions of new cars in Germany, Europe and worldwide.”
The EU is proposing to phase out R134a in favour of CO2 from 2011, and rival system suppliers are developing both CO2-based systems and alternative, less environmentally damaging synthetic refrigerants which would involve significantly less system development for vehicle manufacturers. R-152a, favoured by US vehicle manufacturers, is an HFC chemically and thermodynamically similar to R-134a, but with a global warming potential 90% lower, and it also offers improved cooling efficiency, which promises a fuel consumption improvement. It can be adopted with little change to existing system designs.
R774 is also a promising alternative refrigerant, according to the suppliers Delphi and Behr Hella, and until recently, was expected to become the standard solution industry-wide in Europe. R774 has a comparable lifecycle climate change performance to R152a and provides comparable cooling performance. It also operates more efficiently in heat pump-driven heat transfer compared to HFCs.
www.transportenvironment.org/docs/Bulletin/2007/2007_07_bulletin_160.pdf
News Headlines
