The 50-Billion Pound Gorilla in the Room
Hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs) are the backbone of society’s most critical industries and infrastructure. Not just in air conditioners and fridges, refrigerants make food production and preservation, cloud computing, pharmaceuticals, silicon chip manufacturing, medical and scientific research, all possible at unprecedented efficiency and scale. Unsurprisingly, tens of billions of pounds of HFCs are in use today. As global temperatures continue to rise, so does the use of refrigerants, which is expected to triple by 2050. Unfortunately, these critical materials are also super-pollutant greenhouse gases. On average, they have a global warming potential (GWP) of 2200, which is to say that every pound of HFC refrigerant that escapes into the atmosphere is like releasing a metric ton of CO2.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
So, what can we do about it? Under the Montreal Protocol, the entire world has agreed to move away from high-GWP HFCs in favor of next-generation low-GWP and zero-GWP refrigerants. Sadly, legacy refrigerants can’t just be swapped out for the newest model, so retiring tens of billions of pounds of refrigerant means replacing billions of systems and appliances — no easy task. It will take decades and decades. However, with good refrigerant management, we can minimize the environmental impact of these materials and maximize their life time value and utility, avoiding as much as 100 billion tons of CO2 emissions as we navigate the process.
The best tool in the fight against refrigerant-caused warming is to reuse these materials repeatedly until we can permanently phase them out. This approach ensures they’re not vented into the atmosphere or destroyed and prevents the need to produce new HFCs to take their place. It seems like a no-brainer, right? The problem is that HFC refrigerants are actually complex mixtures of multiple refrigerants, carefully designed never to come apart once mixed. To make it efficient and economical to reuse these refrigerant blends, they must be completely separated. Today, no technology exists that can do the job.
Sustainable Engineering to the Rescue
Icorium is a climate tech startup and spinout of the Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering at the University of Kansas. Building on years of KU research and several million dollars of academic research funding from the National Science Foundation, Icorium’s co-founders, CEO Dr. Kalin Baca and CSO Dr. Mark Shiflett, have developed and are commercializing the first technology capable of efficient, global-scale separation of complex refrigerant mixtures. Still in its first year, the company has achieved successful proof of concept through a $275,000 NSF Small Business R&D grant, raised a $1.5M pre-seed round of funding,and is building a commercial demonstration plant that will separate more than one million pounds of refrigerant per year starting in 2026, with the power to avoid one million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions annually.
Revolutionizing Reclaim on a Global Scale
All of that is just a warmup. By 2029, Icorium plans to cut the ribbon on a first-of-its-kind, industrial-scale, single-stream refrigerant reclamation plant capable of recycling any combination of refrigerants at a massive scale. The first of many, Icorium’s industrial plant will help avoid as much as 25 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions each year in the U.S. alone (the equivalent of 5.6 million cars taken off the road), providing a desperately needed source of recycled refrigerant to meet demand throughout the transition to better alternatives. As other countries follow in the United States’ regulatory footsteps, Icorium and its technologies will be standing by to recycle the estimated 48 billion lbs. of refrigerant that will be deployed in systems globally by 2050, so we can keep cooling without warming the planet.
