Chemours Builds Refrigerant Plant in Texas

US-based Chemours is spending $230 million to build a manufacturing plant for hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) 1234yf, a new refrigerant with extremely low global warming potential (GWP). The facility at the company’s Corpus Christi site in Ingleside, Texas, will use a new, patented process to make Opteon YF with start-up anticipated in the third quarter of 2018. Chemours said it would be the world’s largest manufacturing plant for HFO, tripling capacity for Opteon and maintaining the company’s position as the capacity leader for HFO-1234yf-based products.

Chemours CEO Mark Vergnano said Opteon products have been developed in response to increasingly stringent environmental regulations and that in many cases they perform better than the products they replace. Opteon YF is claimed to have a global warming potential 99.9% lower than the refrigerant it replaces.

The DuPont spin-off is predicting exponential growth in demand for the refrigerant and said the Texas location will allow it to serve growing markets efficiently in North America and Europe, as well as the rest of the world.

In Chemours’ estimate, 40 million cars using HFO-1234yf will be on the road by the end of 2017, with the number rising to 140 million by the end of 2020. It also predicts that 1,000 supermarket and commercial refrigeration systems worldwide will be using Opteon XP40 by the end of 2016, growing to 10,000 systems by the end of 2020.

The company has commercialized Opteon products for use in automotive air conditioning, stationary and transport refrigeration and chillers. It has a development pipeline of additional Opteon solutions for stationary air conditioning, foam blowing agents and waste heat recovery.