Auto Makers Turn to New Refrigerants to Hit EPA Standards

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The Wall Street Journal  /  June 29, 2016

Industry pushes to get emissions credits for making gains to A/C, brakes, wiring

Newer air conditioners are playing an outsize role helping auto makers earn credits toward meeting federal fuel-economy standards, prompting more to adopt cutting edge refrigerants while calling on regulators to let other commonplace parts get similar treatment.

The car industry has been racing to make cars more efficient, investing billions of dollars in battery development or aluminum-body designs capable of closing the gap between today’s fuel-economy requirements and more stringent standards set for coming years. Changing the way cars are cooled was responsible for about 40% of the U.S. emissions credits reported by the industry in 2014, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent data.

“It seems funny to single out air conditioning as a way to get credits since improving it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of tons of carbon dioxide vehicles put out each year,” said Brandon Schoettle, project manager at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. “But it isn’t fiction—air conditioners generate greenhouse gases and they cut fuel economy since they draw energy off the engine.”

The EPA rewards auto makers willing to change the refrigerant in air conditioners, upgrading compressors and using lighter-weight designs. Up to 7% of the credits auto makers can earn to offset vehicles sold with higher emissions can come from these tweaks. Air conditioning’s influence in helping meet standards is only expected to grow, Mr. Schoettle said.

The EPA with other agencies will this summer launch a review of rigid standards taking effect by 2025, with any revisions expected by 2018. 

Auto makers will argue that other parts—ranging from electric door latches that use less copper to electronic steering systems that eliminate hydraulic components—should get credit, too. Those changes are among a long list of moves being made to lower vehicle weights and curb energy consumption.

Consumers, now paying low prices for gasoline, are showing little appetite for efficient cars. The average vehicle sold in May achieved 25.4 miles a gallon, according to Transportation Research Institute data, essentially flat from a year earlier. EPA standards require fuel-economy to more than double by 2025 to 54.5 mpg.

“We urge the government to focus on aligning their standards with the marketplace realities of consumer demand,” says Gloria Bergquist, a lobbyist for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The air conditioning credit is just one example of a “holistic” approach to lowering the harmful greenhouse gasses that automobiles produce.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers lobbies on behalf of General Motors Co. , Toyota Motor Corp. and others. The group also has argued auto makers should get credit for autonomous-driving features, such as automatic braking. As those components lead to better traffic flow, emissions could be cut by a third.

The EPA focuses on air conditioners because of the hydroflourocarbons gasses they produce. These gases are believed to be a major contributor to global warming since they take years to dissipate in the earth’s atmosphere, a spokeswoman said. The agency estimates AC improvements can eliminate up to 9% of greenhouse gases generated by vehicles.

The air conditioning credit scheme has had its critics, but auto makers say the skepticism is unfounded.

“You hear glib comments that this is nothing but a gimmick and it’s frustrating,” Gary Oshnock, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s manager of fuel economy, said. “This is something we put a lot of resources in.”

To earn credits, auto makers rely on auto suppliers to provide new solutions.

Honeywell Inc., for instance, invested $300 million to increase production of HFO-1234yf, a new refrigerant that is 10-times as expensive as R134a, the formula widely used by the industry. 

However, R134a can take up to 13 years to dissipate in the atmosphere, HFO-1234yf dissipates in a few weeks.

“Moving the world’s car production to a low global warming refrigerant is equivalent to removing 30 million cars from the road,” said Ken Gayer, a Honeywell executive in its refrigerants business. He expects 18 million vehicles to use HFO-1234yf by year’s end, just a fraction of the globe’s light-vehicle population.

Jaguar-Land Rover has switched all of its 2016 models to the new refrigerant. Fiat Chrysler has moved about 80% of its fleet and GM expects its entire fleet to change by 2021.

Another move is to retool compressors. Variable compressors, built by companies including Japan’s Denso Corp. , draw less energy from the engine because they don't operate like old compressors that operate at full power until the desired temperature is reached, shut down and then restart that process all over again.

(In both car and home HVAC applications, variable compressors have the ability to adjust power output to the compressor, rather than merely on-off functionality in traditional systems)

“Next to the engine, air conditioning is one of the most complicated systems in a car,” Andrew Clemence, Denso’s thermal engineering vice president, said. It is “one of the contributors between a car’s real-world fuel-efficiency and what is listed on the [window] sticker.”