Refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners and heat pumps all depend on a refrigerant, a fluid that carries heat from one place to another. For decades, the most common choices have been fluorinated gases, or F-gases. Many of them are potent greenhouse gases, and they leak into the atmosphere during manufacturing, operation, servicing and disposal.
Alternatives exist. Natural refrigerants such as CO₂, ammonia and hydrocarbons can do the same job, and in some applications they are already the norm. But a government drafting new regulations, or a company planning its next generation of equipment, still lacks a reliable way to answer some basic questions. Which alternatives should be introduced where? How quickly? And at what cost?
That is the gap the F-MAP project sets out to fill. Funded by the EU's Horizon Europe programme and coordinated by SINTEF Energy Research, the project brings together nine partners from six countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. The consortium met in Trondheim on 22 September to launch three years of work.
Demand is growing fastest outside Europe
Europe has come a long way in phasing out F-gases. But the growth in cooling is happening elsewhere. According to estimates from the International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR), one of the project partners, the number of air-conditioning units worldwide will increase 2.5-fold between 2021 and 2050, with the steepest growth in India, the Middle East and Africa. At the same time, heat pumps are being installed at a rapid pace to replace fossil fuels in homes and industry.
Every one of these units needs a refrigerant, and the choices made now will affect emissions for decades. Project lead Cecilia Gabrielii (Senior Research Scientist, SINTEF) explains: “The technologies to replace F-gases already exist, and many of them were developed here in Trondheim. What's missing is a transparent way to compare them. We want to give authorities and industry a tool that shows what the transition could cost, how fast it could go, and what it means for emissions in their own country."
An open tool for many kinds of users
At the heart of F-MAP is a modelling tool that will calculate mitigation pathways: routes from today's mix of equipment to one with much lower emissions. Users will be able to ask the tool for the cheapest route that meets a given emissions target, or for the route that cuts emissions the most within a given budget. Because electric cooling and heating add to electricity demand, the tool also shows how different pathways affect the power grid.
The tool is built on EnergyModelsX, an open-source optimisation framework developed by SINTEF. It will offer a simple default setup for non-specialists and more advanced options for experts. Both the code and the data will be freely available, so that researchers, authorities and industry anywhere can inspect the assumptions and run their own analyses, including after the project ends.
Better data first
A model is only as good as the information fed into it, and data on F-gases are patchy in many parts of the world. The partners will collect and harmonise figures on how much F-gas is used, how much is already contained in installed equipment, and how much leaks out over the equipment's lifetime.
The project will also attempt to estimate the contribution of illegal trade. Restrictions on the most harmful gases have created a black market, which in some countries is estimated to make up as much as 30 per cent of the national market.
In parallel, the partners are building a database of the technologies installed today and the best alternatives available, later adding next-generation solutions still under development. The project will also look beyond cooling and heating to SF₆, a gas used in electrical switchgear with a very strong warming effect. Its use in switchgear will be banned in Europe from 2031, but it remains largely unregulated elsewhere.
Four countries, four starting points
To test the tool under real conditions, the project will carry out case studies in four countries with very different climates, energy systems and policies, each supported by a local partner.
Italy represents an EU country with mature F-gas regulation and a well-developed cooling and heating industry. North Macedonia offers the perspective of a European country outside the EU, facing different regulatory and energy-system conditions. Ghana has a tropical climate, fast-growing cooling demand and a real opportunity to skip F-gases altogether and go straight to natural refrigerants. South Korea is a highly developed economy with advanced cooling technology.
Each case study will be run twice, once to find the lowest-cost pathway and once to find the lowest-emission pathway, and the results will be presented at workshops in each country. An advisory group of stakeholders from industry, authorities and international organisations will follow the work throughout.
Building on decades of experience
SINTEF and NTNU have worked on natural refrigerants since the late 1980s. Heat pump water heaters using CO₂ as refrigerant, which have now passed 10 million units produced, started in their laboratories. SINTEF researchers were also central to introducing CO₂ in supermarket refrigeration, which is now found in more than 115,000 stores worldwide.
F-MAP puts that experience to a different use. Rather than developing a single technology, the project aims to give decision-makers a transparent way to compare them all, and to see what the transition could look like in their own country.
The first version of the tool is scheduled for release within the project's first 18 months.
