Chemours recently broke ground on a new refrigerant facility in Ingleside, Texas, which will triple the company's production capacity. The low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant products and blends manufactured at the plant will be sold under the Opteon name.
The new facility will be the world's largest plant used for manufacturing hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) and will allow Chemours to serve the growing market in North America and Europe, as well as the rest of the world. Currently, Chemours is the capacity leader for HFO-1234yf-based products.
"This new facility represents a significant step forward for Chemours, as it demonstrates our commitment to providing low GWP solutions to the refrigerants industry," said Mark Vergnano, Chemours president and CEO. "We see our Opteon products as the future for this industry since they provide the optimal balance of properties necessary to transition the world away from HFCs, the previous generation of refrigerants."
Chemours has commercialized Opteon refrigeration products for use in automotive air conditioning, stationary and transport refrigeration, and chillers. The company also has a development pipeline of additional Opteon solutions for stationary air conditioning, foam blowing agents and waste heat recovery.
The new plant will use a patented process to manufacture Opteon YF, a mobile refrigerant product used in automotive air conditioning, and Opteon refrigerant blends, which are used across a range of applications.
"We've already seen tremendous adoption of our Opteon low GWP refrigerants, and it's estimated that by the end of 2017 there will be over 50 million cars on the road globally using low GWP HFO-1234yf refrigerant," said Paul Kirsch, president of Chemours Fluoroproducts. "Our market projections also suggest that our Opteon refrigerants could be used in well over 10,000 supermarket and commercial refrigeration systems by 2020."
For more information, visit www.chemours.com.
