Mobile air conditioning units with carbon dioxide are climate-friendly and efficient | Umweltbundesamt

An EU directive has banned the use of fluorinated greenhouse gases with global warming potential exceeding 150 in mobile air conditioning systems since January 2011. CO2 used as a refrigerant is an alternative. An UBA official car had used a CO2 mobile air conditioning system from 2009 to 2017. Since October 2016, first cars with CO2 air conditioning systems have been offered. read more

Protect the climate with carbon dioxide-sounds like a contradiction? It may at first seem paradoxical to want to protect the climate with a greenhouse gas, but this is not so in the case of refrigerants used in mobile air conditioning systems.  In fact, carbon dioxide (CO2) is an ecological alternative to the refrigerant tetrafluoroethane commonly used to date. CO2 harms the climate up to 1,300 times less than the fluorinated greenhouse gas does. Since carbon dioxide is considerably more climate-friendly than tetrafluoroethane, the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) is calling for CO2 to be used as the refrigerant in mobile air conditioning units. read more