Refrigerant gas cylinders.
Small-town Bay of Plenty is about to be home to a Southern Hemisphere first with big benefits in the fight against potent greenhouse gases.
A new multimillion-dollar plant officially opens in Kawerau today to safely destroy harmful synthetic refrigerants.
The Trust for the Destruction of Synthetic Refrigerants, which put $10 million into the plant, said it will significantly reduce that harm.
But it also means the refrigerants won’t have to be shipped offshore.
“The trust has been around since 1993, set up by the industry to deal with CFCs, the old ozone-depleting gases,” chairperson Richard Lauder said.
“So we collected them, shipped them to Australia and destroyed them so that we could address the hole in the ozone layer.
“And we’ve since migrated to dealing with their replacement gases, the hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs, which are very high global warming gases.”
Lauder said the Kawerau plant was built to take the risks that come with shipping.
It also means the gases will no longer have to be stockpiled
“Next month we’ll turn the plasma torch on at this plant, it runs at 5000C – the same temperature as the sun – and we’ll be able to deal with our own waste fluorinated gases here domestically in New Zealand,” he said.
“Some of these gases are 4000 times more potent than CO2, so to put that into perspective, if you release 1kg of gas from your heat pump at home, it might be like driving your car for two years in terms of climate impact.
“So we really need to deal with them appropriately, and our trust believed that setting up a plant on shore was the right thing to do.”
Kawerau was picked because of its industrial past.
“I think from the paper industry in particular we’ve got all sorts of skills and capabilities, it’s also adjacent to new geothermal plants so we can use renewable energy to power our plant. I think it’s a great place to put this thing,” Lauder said.
It will permanently eliminate CFCs, HCFCs and HFCs from synthetic refrigerants.
According to the Ministry for the Environment, it is HFCs, or hydrofluorocarbons, that make up 94% of so-called F-gas emissions.
There are measures in place, such as limits on bulk HFC imports and pricing schemes under the Emissions Trading Scheme and a Synthetic Greehouse Gas Levy, it said.
The Trust for the Destruction of Synthetic Refrigerants said the new plant will manage gases at the end of their life.
These are found in heat pumps, commercial refrigeration and air conditioning systems across the country, it said.
It said that while there is a place for recycling and claiming the gases, which extends to fully address climate change, ultimately they need to be safely destroyed.
“The 5000C is required because these F-gases are really stable,” Lauder said.
“So the 5000C breaks them down into individual atoms, we inject steam, we add calcium carbonate, and the chemicals that come out the end are actually just water, CO2 that goes to the atmosphere and calcium fluoride salt which is an inert salt which is in fact what’s in your toothpaste, and we can just dump that to landfill until we can find an alternative use hopefully.”
Laura Revell, an atmospheric chemistry professor from the University of Canterbury, said there were benefits to no longer having to ship the gases offshore.
“It has high costs associated with it and it creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide and so on, so by being able to dispose of these gases here in New Zealand means that we are reducing our shipping emissions and contribution to climate change in that way.”
-RNZ