The Chemours Company (Chemours), a global chemistry company with leading market positions in titanium technologies, fluoroproducts and chemical solutions, announced today that the Dutch retailing group Ahold has successfully completed its plan to retrofit over 175 supermarkets across the Netherlands to Opteon™ XP40. This new low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant from Chemours helped Ahold to reduce its CO2 emissions by over 57,000 tons per year without increasing their abatement cost, defined as the amount which has to be invested to save one ton of CO2.
Ahold began the project in September of 2014 as part of their self-imposed program to dramatically cut their CO2 emissions by 20 percent relative to 2008 levels by 2015. The decision to transition their refrigeration systems to Opteon™ XP40 was made after an initial trial in which the new refrigerant was shown to provide a distinctly higher energy efficiency than the previously used R-407F and R-507A.
Ahold and their consultants, P.W. Vlaskamp B.V. Refrigeration Consultancy, Dordrecht (Netherlands) recently ran a series of tests to determine the effectiveness of the retrofit to Opteon™ XP40. The results showed that retrofitting their refrigeration systems to Opteon™ XP40 provided an eight percent boost in energy efficiency, which helped contribute to the 57,000 ton reduction in emissions. It was also determined that due to the lack of abatement costs, the entire capital expenditure of the retrofit would pay for itself in under five years, with further financial gains being made as the systems continue to run.
“To see these results has completely validated our decision to retrofit to Opteon™ XP40,” said Ahold's M.M.A. de Rooij. “We knew that XP40 would provide the environmental benefits as a low GWP refrigerant, but the cost savings and return on investment made it so that we could meet the increasing regulations while actually improving the performance of our refrigeration systems.”
“The results of the retrofit show that Opteon™ XP40 is the optimal low GWP replacement for commercial refrigeration systems,” said Diego Boeri, vice president Chemours Fluorochemicals. “We appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with Ahold on this project and we continue to see many other major supermarkets following their lead.”
Opteon™ XP40 (R-449A), the Chemours flagship non-flammable (A1) replacement for R-404A refrigerant, is approved by major equipment compressor manufacturers and has already seen widespread global adoption since commercialization in 2014. XP40 provides a 65% reduction in GWP over R-404A, while improving R-404A system energy efficiency up to 12%. As a result of XP40’s strong performance in the field, and based on current orders and customer product testing, Chemours recently announced that XP40 is on pace to be used in over 1,000 supermarket and commercial refrigeration systems worldwide by the end of 2016.
The Opteon™ portfolio of refrigerants from Chemours were developed to help meet increasing global HFC regulations while maintaining or improving performance compared to incumbent products.