Have your say: End date for R134a in new cars

Under standards released for public consultation on 20 September, no new passenger vehicle would be allowed into the country from 1 January 2028 charged with an HFC refrigerant with a global warming potential of 150 or more. R134a has a GWP of 1430.

The proposed decision, published by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) under the Industrial Chemicals Environmental Management Standard (IChEMS) puts numbers and dates on the intention that DCCEEW Director of Atmospheric Chemicals Policy Dr Paul Taylor revealed during his keynote at Wire & Gas 2026 on August 1.

Public consultation closes at 5pm AEST on Friday 23 October and a public webinar runs on Wednesday 30 September from 2pm to 3:30pm AEST (the department has asked for questions in advance to be sent to ichems.enquiry@dcceew.gov.au).

• All the information and a link to the consultation survey are here.
• You can register for a 90-minute IChEMS public webinar (on Wednesday September 30 at 2pm AEST) here.

Dr Taylor told the Wire & Gas audience that the intention is “to prohibit new cars entering the market from being charged with R134a and to support responsible, sustainable use of R1234yf as the current technology”.

As well as banning them at import, the proposed standards are explicit that a new passenger-vehicle system cannot be charged with R134a after import.

Buses and coaches, passenger rail, locomotives, motorhomes, caravans, marine vessels and off-road plant including harvesters, forklifts, mining vehicles, road construction equipment and cranes are classified large mobile air-conditioning, which retain access to HFCs subject to a review after January 1, 2032.

“The consultation we’re doing in September is a genuine consultation,” Dr Taylor said.

“If things are going to be problematic, if they’re not going to work, really please do reach out.”

Closing a gap that was always there

Australia’s HFC phase-down caps bulk imports of refrigerant (arrives in cylinders rather than equipment) and measures the cap by carbon dioxide equivalent, so one kilogram of R134a consumes 1430 kilograms of an importer’s quota.

Under the phase-down, these imports must fall 85 per cent between 2018 and 2036 and are already down by almost half on where they started.

“There is a limitation to the phase-down, and it doesn’t include pre-charged equipment,” Dr Taylor told Wire & Gas attendees.

“This means stuff that comes into the country that is already charged with refrigerant. So that obviously includes new vehicles.”

Every vehicle arriving with R134a since the phase-down started has created a servicing obligation that lasts as long as the car does, drawing on a bulk supply that is shrinking by design.

The department’s projections show demand for R134a overtaking supply from late this decade and Dr Taylor said the modelling showed no relief coming on its own.

“We’re not projecting a significant fall-off in demand based on the current policy settings,” he said.

R134a now accounts for 36 per cent of bulk HFC brought into Australia measured in CO2 equivalent, up from 25 per cent, making it the single largest component of the mix ahead of R404A on 31 per cent and R410A on 17 per cent. Tonnage has risen from its 2023 low despite a phase-down step being taken in the same period.

“There is this risk that Australia can be perceived as a dumping ground for high GWP equipment if we don’t put in place appropriate regulatory barriers to do that,” Dr Taylor said.

Given car manufacturers have been so slow to stop sending R134a vehicles to Australia of their own volition, some of them might lobby against the proposed changes.

“I think the hurdle is getting the automotive manufacturers on board, but we think we can do that as well,” Dr Taylor told the Wire & Gas audience.

Letting the market decide didn’t work

The assumption when the phase-down was designed was that Australia would be carried along by everyone else. Refrigerants are not made here and most equipment is imported, so in a global market moving in one direction the product mix arriving at these shores should have moved with it.

Dr Taylor’s Wire & Gas presentation included data (albeit dated) that demonstrated the error of this assumption.

Japan supplied 30 per cent of the light vehicles imported into Australia in 2022 and does not permit R134a in new vehicles sold at home. China is barring it from new passenger vehicles from 2029 despite not being compelled to do so under its Montreal Protocol obligations as a developing market.

Other major sources of vehicles to Australia include the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom, all of which restrict R134a in new cars. Thailand, South Korea and Mexico are notable exceptions.

“So the transition is there, is what I’m saying, in all of these markets,” Dr Taylor said.

“We’re experiencing not the transition that we would have liked to have seen, or thought we would have seen, given one would expect that broadly, passenger vehicles is a pretty global market these days.”

Inverse modelling of atmospheric concentrations across north-western Europe, published this year in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, shows R134a emissions falling where restrictions have been in place.

HFOs come into the net

The second proposed decision helps settle a topic the Wire & Gas audience pushed government, ARC and industry representatives hardest on: Whether R1234yf, a refrigerant with negligible global warming potential, carries any handling obligation at all.

If the proposed standard makes it through unchanged, the answer is yes. From January 1 2027, anyone importing, using or disposing of HFOs would be required to avoid intentional release to the environment, to make efforts to prevent release during use and disposal, and to manage and dispose of the product in an environmentally sound manner.

The department does not prescribe how this would work but its own worked examples are familiar to anyone working with mainstream refrigerants, including servicing systems and repairing leaks, capturing rather than venting during maintenance, returning used refrigerant for reclamation or destruction and keeping records.

Asked by a Wire & Gas attendee what responsible use of R1234yf would look like in practice, Dr Taylor said “venting to atmosphere should be avoided.”

“We would say recovery definitely, definitely should be performed.”

Refrigerant Reclaim Australia (RRA) general manager Kylie Farrelley told the conference that “the importers of HFO, on a voluntary basis, continue to pay the levy and fund the destruction of the product, even though there’s no regulatory obligation to do so”.

She confirmed that RRA takes R1234yf and disposes of it at end of life.

The HFO decision is scheduled for its own review after 1 January 2032 because the department says information on the environmental risks of the chemistry is still emerging (there is well-publicised global scrutiny over PFAS and TFA byproducts of R1234yf and other refrigerants).

Notably, R1234yf would not be administered under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act at all, but through Commonwealth, state and territory environmental law (which is the reason IChEMS exists).

Under the ozone legislation the department can only regulate what the Montreal Protocol controls, which leaves HFOs, hydrocarbons and other low-GWP refrigerants beyond its reach.

“We can’t regulate HFOs. We can’t regulate hydrocarbons or CO2 or any of those things,” Dr Taylor said, describing the prospect of reopening the Ozone Act as “almost impossible to do in the current environment”.

The IChEMS consultation also carries proposed standards for hydrocarbon refrigerants, with ethane, propane and butanes at schedule 2 and the pentanes at schedule 3.

What it means in the workshop

For workshops, Dr Taylor offered little comfort about the costs involved in servicing existing R134a equipment.

“R134a is becoming more expensive,” he said, adding that this will continue “because we continue to have new vehicles entering the market, and new other equipment entering the market that requires it as well”.

He was equally blunt that relief will not come from the quota. When a Wire & Gas delegate pointed out that expensive gas pushes people towards substitutes nobody controls and drew a comparison with illegal tobacco, Dr Taylor said the market set the price and that quota settings would not move.

“The government is 100 per cent committed to meeting our phase-down obligations and sticking to the path we’re on,” he said.

What the proposal does change is the shape of the work. Large numbers of R134a vehicles will keep arriving until the end of 2027 and will need servicing for as long as it stays on the road, from a supply of refrigerant that gets tighter every two years.

It means recovery and reclamation moves from good practice to commercial sense, a shift Dr Taylor said was already visible in stationary air-conditioning and refrigeration, where reclamation, R404A in particular, had become commercially viable in the past six to 12 months.

Beyond passenger vehicles, transport and marine refrigeration plus ultra-low temperature systems keep their HFC access pending review after 1 January 2032. All other new domestic and commercial cold chain equipment goes to 150 from 2028.

HFCs will remain available for maintaining in-service equipment, essential uses including military and aerospace, research and laboratory work, as well as destruction, reclamation and re-use. Where an HFC is permitted, the lowest GWP refrigerant suitable for the job must be chosen.

Equipment already in use in Australia before 1 January 2028 can still be serviced with R134a where the manufacturer specifies it.

Retrofits still unclear

Retrofit is the gap nobody has filled, at least not yet.

Asked whether the department was waiting on the market to settle the question of what replaces R134a in an existing system, Dr Taylor said it would but made it clear that “we would not consider hydrocarbons a safe retrofit”.

Discussion at Wire & Gas centred on R513A retrofits, which are already starting to take place in New Zealand and other jurisdictions. Chemours and Solstice are pushing for R1234yf retrofits into R134a systems and other alternatives are on the table.

However, VASA’s position is that several factors must be taken into account before adopting retrofits.

A trainer in the room said Australian retrofit unit of competence AURETU105 had been dropped from training programs after the R12 changeover and that the workforce would likely have to be retrained to deliver it.

Have your say

Submissions close at 5pm AEST on Friday 23 October through the department’s Have Your Say portal, where the proposed standards, chemical profiles and stakeholder factsheets are published.

• All the information and a link to the consultation survey are here.
• You can register for a 90-minute IChEMS public webinar (on Wednesday September 30 at 2pm AEST) here.