Opteon™: The Road to Beijing and a World Beyond

This February, while the eyes of the world will be on the best-of-the-best performances of athletes on the ice in Beijing, the minds of Chemours and the HVACR industry will be on what lies beneath the surface—Chemours’ Opteon™ XP40. In keeping with their mission to be “green, open, inclusive, and clean,” and adopt more sustainable solutions, organizers for the 2022 Winter Games selected Opteon™ XP40 as the refrigerant for the Beijing National Aquatics Center, Beijing National Indoor Stadium, and the Wukesong Sports Centre. Beyond supplying the refrigerant for these venues and offering an approximate 65% reduction in global warming potential (GWP) compared to previous ice games, Chemours is proud of the ways our participation upholds the Games’ time-honored tradition of celebrating the very best athleticism and a universal spirit of competition that transcends boundaries of country, continent, and cultures. Opteon™ XP40 will deliver stable, reliable ice performance under the Games’ demanding conditions, in a way that elevates sustainability and safety, allowing athletes to put their full focus on playing their best and spectators to enjoy the sport at its finest—without worry.

For the athletes in these arenas—the men’s and women’s hockey players and curling teams—as well as other sports of the Games, Beijing is the ultimate destination. They’ve taken a lifelong journey of training, practices, competition, and sacrifice downs to reach this one place. But for Chemours, this worldwide stage is one stop along a journey that started.

The Opteon™ Journey

Just as no athlete simply wakes up one day as one of the “greatest” in their sport, the innovation of the Opteon™ portfolio tracks an evolution of refrigerant products. In looking at this journey of Chemours refrigerants, you can see a parallel evolution of buyers’ needs, refrigeration’s role in society, cooling technology, environmental initiatives, and the regulatory landscape. The steps along this journey show not the “building of a better mousetrap” and elimination of predecessors, but instead progress built upon progress to offer next-generation solutions that to this day continue to have relevance and value no matter where they fall in the evolutionary line.

Opteon™ XP40 and XP10 Tackle Global Warming

Certainly, the industry didn’t go five decades without refrigerant improvements. R-134a options were expanded in an ongoing effort to satisfy both the escalating ozone-depletion concerns of environmental leaders and the escalating practicality concerns — in terms costs, equipment retrofits and replacements, and so on—of HVCAR markets. Many of these early innovations contribute to the next major evolution in refrigerant history, Opteon™ XP40 and XP10. Opteon™ was born from the reality that everything that fueled modern life — within the HVACR industry and beyond — came under scrutiny to assess their impact on the climate. As concerns over global temperatures rose, so did the threat to the health of the planet and the people on it. Chemours rose to the challenge by introducing our Opteon™ refrigerants portfolio, founded on uncompromisable focus of ensuring the optimal balance of cost, sustainability, safety, and performance. The Opteon™ “revolution” began with Opteon™ XP40 and XP10 solutions which we designed to support our markets in the transition away from higher GWP technologies. Opteon™ XP40 and XP10 provide the win-win our industry and our world need — better-for-the-environment zero-ozone depletion, lower-GWP refrigerants that allow users to take a phase-in, not an all-in, approach to compliance through retrofitting or new systems. Chemours’ Opteon™ XP series was commercialized in Europe and North America in 2014 and 2015, respectively, has been approved by Major OEMs and is being used in thousands of systems worldwide.

Opteon™ XL - Present and Future Focused

Looking back, every milestone represents not just innovation, but Chemours next-generation approach that keeps our company, and, therefore our customers, one step ahead. Today, that next-generation refrigerant solution is available in the Opteon™ XL portfolio of products, which have been specifically designed for new and energy-efficient equipment. As more and more companies become ready to invest in new equipment—either by choice and ability or by necessity due to equipment aged past its usefulness—Opteon™ XL refrigerants are ready to be part of their improved performance, greater energy efficiency transition, while meeting the changing requirements of the regulatory landscape in terms of environmental sustainability, zero ozone depletion and ultra-low GWP.

The final takeaway from this historical journey is a lesson learned by every athlete—one skill does not a champion make. As the above narrative demonstrates, Chemours solutions never set out to deliver “one great benefit.” Instead, as the Opteon™ portfolio epitomizes, every new generation of product balances all the influencing factors our customers and world care about—high performance, safety, cost, adaptability, and environmental stability. Moreover, just as athletes build an arsenal of abilities, so does Chemours. New discoveries and solutions are built on the lessons of their as we enhance our value to the industry and world.

A World Beyond

While we deeply value the opportunities the Games gives Chemours to tell our story and help more people understand how Opteon™ solutions fit into their lives, businesses and communities, for us this is by no means the “ultimate” stage of our journey. Instead, we find ourselves poised to launch into the next world for Opteon™ and, in fact, for Chemours’ vision as a different kind of chemistry company making our impact in heating and cooling technologies and sustainability, decarbonization of products and the processes that make them, use of alternative energy sources, IoT, and taking our world closer to a circular economy. From here, we confidently see another century of evolution driven by a changing landscape of environmental regulations, and, quite possibly new inventions in everything from transportation to food storage to how homes are built and controlled, that will take our industry to new heights we can only dream of today. So, when February 20 ceremonies bring the Games to a close, a new, exciting future opens for the world of HVACR. And Chemours remains committed to leading the journey.