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Comment by callalex | Hacker News Reader

It stood out to me that this website states, as a matter of inevitable and accepted fact, that the use of refrigerants will be banned from the EU in some kind of short timeframe. That seems a bit insane on its face unless I am completely out of touch with EU politics since I am in the USA. Refrigerants are extremely useful and are capable of offsetting their greenhouse effects by so many orders of magnitude it isn’t even worth discussing. Heat pumps are finally taking off and have the potential to throw out fossil fuel heating in most of the world within the next decade. Why would anyone want to stop that?

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I assume the relevant text is this:

In cooling technology, the gradual ban on refrigerants under the European F-Gas Regulations makes alternative, refrigerant-free technologies more desirable.

That seems like a reasonable statement. I'm not sure why you took that to mean a "short timeframe" or a complete ban on all refrigerants.

Edit: here's a link with some information about the F-gas regulations.

https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/fluorinated-greenhous...

Yes, it is an interesting move of the EU [0]. The manufacturers of heatpumps are already lining up alternatives: mostly Propane (R290) but also CO2 (R744).

How does that align with the billions being invested in Hydrogen, a gas with a GWP of 11? This stuff will leak to the atmosphere at a massive scale soon, dwarfing the tiny tanks of f-gases.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/nl/ip_22_...

Yep there are already multiple heatpumps on the EU market that work with Propane. Interestingly, they are also marketed as "high temp", capable of emitting 75C water to drive normal aluminium radiators, similar to how a condensing boiler would.

In part this is due to how this still has a commonly accepted pressure ratio (vapor pressure at condenser:evaporator ought to be ~10:1 for fridge-like compressor designs to be happy), and in part because having the propane equipment outdoors and only interacting with water/water-glycol-mix for thermally connecting to indoors makes the safety aspects far easier. It's now hard for propane to sneak indoors, form a mildly concentrated puddle, any blow up from static discharge at the next opportunity.

Propane/air heat exchanger are normally dangerous due to difficulty of dealing with a leak even if you use a sensor to detect leakage of dangerous concentrations of propane into the air. At least if this is indoor air.

Fluorinated refrigerants. The GHG effect of these is far, far worse than CO2, which means we'd need to see numbers for

> capable of offsetting their greenhouse effects by so many orders of magnitude

It seems to be known as F-gas known or CE 517/2014 and its effect in europe right now is about phasing out the most harmful fluorine based gas, (going from R-410A to R-32) and mandating regular maintenance and forbidding installation of heat pumps by non qualified individuals (to prevent leaks)

The EU regulation is about industrial use of fluorinated greenhouse gasses.. I don't think that will ban other refrigerants

Yeah you can use propane, isobutane, ammonia, or CO2. The first two are flammable, the second is both. And CO2 requires higher pressure.

They aren't as nice from a safety or operations standpoint but ain't the end of the world really. Although they are now way cheaper than fluorocarbons.

The CO2 heatpump needs more than 150 bar, like having a small OceanGate in your attic.

More like having a medical oxygen or welding gas tank in your attic (except with a much less reactive gas).

Or like a convenience whipped cream dispenser. Quantity and geometry certainly makes one more volatile than the other, but the number alone isn't all that far out.

Huh? Propane is quite easy to deal with, though? Besides being flammable, but that merely means you have to ensure it gets sufficiently diluted in case it feeds indoors, doesn't have an opportunity to asphyxiate occupants, and isn't eager to burn the house down in a typical catastrophic malfunction.

Unlike fluorocarbons, you don't need to worry about leaks beyond the flammability/asphyxiation aspects, and could conceivably flare excess/contaminated charge off (just to prevent an explosive food from being able to form), with no environmental worries beyond the burning/flaring of fossil fuel (and whatever contamination the oil contributes). Might not be legal in a particular jurisdiction, but I assume that's a product of fluorocarbons being the norm and them being an environmental issue to leak, supporting a blanket ban on leaking any.

It seems that refrigerants get a lot of bad press. In particular in heatpumps. Nobody seems to really cares about the gasses used in refrigerators or aircos in cars.

Obviously, it is good to ban particularly bad gasses. Freon because of its negative effect on the ozon-layer. The same way some gasses have a very large greenhouse effect and can be replaced by gasses that are better.

If a new technique becomes mature and it has obvious benefits over the existing solution, that it not a bad idea to prohibit the old, poluting way.

> Nobody seems to really cares about the gasses used in refrigerators or aircons in cars

I believe Project Drawdown selected refrigerant managament as one of the top climate change mitigation strategies:

https://drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management

Ozone-depleting CFCs have been banned world-wide in the 90s, and some HFCs with large global warming potential have been banned for use in cars in both the US and the EU.

I think only the environmentally unfriendly refrigerants will be banned.

It's the crazy persistent halo/fluorocarbons that will be banned, things like pentane will be ok...

I think R-410 just got sunsetted in the USA. It wont take effect for sometime and like other disused refrigerants technicians can reclaim the banned refrigerant from a system and use it somewhere else. The ban is on new equipment and new refrigerant production.

Many alternative refrigerants are combustible. That's not a big problem for stationary use, but in vehicles it is.

It is confusing that the article mentions buildings and not vehicles though.

Almost reminds me of the whole parallel debate around nuclear...

Better than fossil fuels but has some of its own (comparativly smaller) waste problems, and its also getting phased out.

> and its also getting phased out

That's disputable

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