Chinese automobile air conditioning market transition to natural refrigerants
China has been one of the world’s leading automotive markets for many years, with more than 408 million vehicles on its roads in August 2022. At the same time, China is actively limiting car exhaust emissions and gradually tightening restrictions on them.
As of 2020, almost every passenger car and bus in China, and more than 90 percent of trucks, are equipped with air conditioning systems. At the same time, drivers are not informed about the energy consumption of air conditioning systems in various conditions, which makes them more energy intensive.
In recent decades, hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants have been widely used in vehicles because they provide good heat transfer characteristics and are affordable. Today, however, the world is moving away from HFC-based refrigerants in favor of natural refrigerants. This is because the global warming potential of HFC-based refrigerants is greater than 1000, which means that their impact on climate warming is more than 1000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide-based refrigerants.
Climate warming impacts are of two types. Refrigerants are released into the atmosphere during assembly, maintenance, operation, and recycling and disposal. These refrigerant leaks are referred to as direct emissions and account for about 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions from automotive air conditioning systems. The remaining 70% are indirect emissions associated with increased energy consumption for the operation of automotive air conditioning systems. While several studies have shown that automotive air conditioning systems account for 3 to 7 percent of total fuel consumption in passenger cars, this figure can be as high as 20 percent in humid, hot climates. For heavier vehicles, the climate warming impact is even more severe. A report by the International Council for Clean Transportation found that about 30 percent of all energy in buses is consumed by their air-conditioning systems.
To date, carbon dioxide is being actively introduced into air conditioning systems. It provides high cooling performance with a global warming potential of less than 1. However, in China, the refrigerant is still under the patent protection of international chemical giants. Chinese suppliers are forced to pay high surcharges, which prevents its widespread use in new cars. In addition, the use of natural refrigerants such as CO2 is associated with additional costs for the modernization of currently used air conditioning systems. Also, China has yet to release a specific roadmap requiring the automotive industry to phase out HFC-based refrigerants, and thus there is little willingness from automakers to make the transition. International experience shows that the replacement of refrigerants is largely driven by policy, and in the absence of the government’s desire to stimulate the industry to switch to natural refrigerants, the process of replacing obsolete refrigerants with new ones will be hampered.