Cold Hard Facts and uncomfortable truths about Australia’s HFC phase-down

A line on page 38 of the fourth Cold Hard Facts report, commissioned by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, sums up six years of lost opportunity: “The service usage for small MAC is significant and represents almost 19% of all HFCs consumed on RAC equipment in 2022.”

That year, 644.6 tonnes of R134a was sold in Australia according to an aftermarket supplier survey cited in Cold Hard Facts 4, of which 122.5 tonnes went to automotive service and repair.

This sales figure does not include refrigerant in pre-charged equipment, which for the automotive sector alone comes to about 550 tonnes of R134a.

From all sources, Refrigerant Reclaim Australia collects and destroys around 200 tonnes of R134a per year, so there is a high chance that a significant amount escapes from vehicles to do harm in the atmosphere due to collisions, system malfunctions and improper vehicle disposal at end of life.

Had the federal government introduced a ban on light vehicles pre-charged with R134a at the beginning of the HFC phase-down in January 2018, we would likely be looking at a very different set of figures today, and a government able to brag about kicking some serious green goals at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Azerbaijan capital Baku.

As Cold Hard Facts 4 puts it: “Automakers continue to supply models with older generations of refrigerants to any markets that permit HFCs, while making HFO-charged models widely available only where they are required to by law.”

“HFOs, that had been predicted to appear in the Australian market soon after release internationally around 2011, appear to have finally begun to be employed in an identifiable portion of new cars sold.”

Although SightGlass has discovered that all vehicles from Chinese brand BYD appear to run R1234yf, Cold Hard Facts 4 notes that the rapid growth in Chinese new vehicle imports could slow rather than hasten the transition.

“The shift in the country of origin towards China is likely to slow the transition to HFO-1234yf further, given the absence of regulation in Australia. China does not have an internal regulated target for phasing out HFCs in MAC similar to those in Europe or Japan.”

To the end of October 2024, China was the third-largest source of light vehicle imports to Australia after Japan and Thailand, with Korea around 13,000 units behind China, with combined European imports ranking fifth.

Cold Hard Facts 4 reports: “Research conducted in the USA, Europe and Japan in 2023 appears to confirm that the transition to HFOs in new vehicles in those markets is well underway, with the very large majority of vehicles currently manufactured in the USA, Europe and Japan now containing HFO-1234yf.”

US vehicle imports are a distant seventh, after ‘other’.

So it seems Cold Hard Facts 4 is on the money with its assessment that vehicle manufacturers are deciding to export vehicles with R134a even if they have to charge them with R1234yf for domestic markets and those which have equipment bans in place.

On the upside, the report estimates that around 60 per cent of all new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles imported to Australia in 2028 will be charged with low global warming potential refrigerant, increasing to 80 per cent by 2030.

But, as SightGlass has found, getting accurate figures is difficult – even for the Expert Group which compiles Cold Hard Facts, explains in its report:

“As HFOs are not regulated and the import of HFOs is not reportable under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act 1989, changes to year-on-year vehicle sales, and changes to numbers of imported vehicles reported to include HFC charged systems, have been used to deduce the likely volume of HFOs imported in MAC.”