We all know the history and the mad rush to comply with EU regulations only to find the economy and global following of us "European super powers" decisions is not quite as important as we like to imagine!

Global Carbon impact of greenhouse gas leakage is 2% but this has an indirect impact from increased energy usage raising the impact to 8%. Don't forget though that global transportation is amounting to over 25% of Global Carbon impact.

There is a line of thinking that if you built a better engineered system you could put what you wanted in it as the leakage rate would be insignificant.

So aside from the fact that R22 was banned for an ODP of 0.05 GWP of 1700 and replaced with refrigerants of 0 ODP and GWP's of 1300 - 1725. We now have a multitude of refrigerants and blends to meet current requirements.

The decision for the future will be to find refrigerants with low GWP. i.e. R32, R290, CO2, Ammonia etc.

Europe seems to be inclined towards CO2 and 1234yf
While "that little known country signing its name all over our products" has invested massively in R134a
We have seen how readily the powerhouses adopt our bureaucratic penmanship from Brussels and can expect more of the same.

But what is the future?
Do we consider a specific refrigerant for every application? or is their a easy mass product around the corner?

I would be interested in members views on what we consider to be the next "big thing" refrigerant