hydrocarbons21.com spoke with Peter Gosselin about Ben & Jerry’s pilot scheme to introduce hydrocarbon refrigerant cabinets in the United States, and about the false image the refrigerants have sustained. Highlighting the political and technical hurdles still facing HCs in the US he predicts a bright future for the HC industry.

In many ways Ben & Jerry’s spearheaded the introduction of hydrocarbons in the USA. Was it difficult and how did you get approval from the EPA?

The introduction of the Clean Air Act in the early 1990’s opened an opportunity to petition the EPA for a small pilot project to test hydrocarbons. We were able to import the cabinets from around the world and install them in selected stores. The purpose of this was to test the market and gather practical data on the performance of the cabinets. In 2008, we imported 50 cabinets and introduced a variety of cabinets mainly in the Boston and Washington DC area’s. Results show that over the last two years the cabinets have performed on par with competing cabinets with no safety incidents. In fact the figures have highlighted that the cabinets use 10% less energy.

How would you describe the current state of introducing hydrocarbons?

The process towards full introduction of cabinets in the USA is in many ways still in motion. Currently there are a variety hurdles on a technical and legislative level that are preventing introduction. On a legislative level, hydrocarbons are still awaiting SNAP approval, currently the situation in the US is that HCs are banned by the EPA. The Point of Sale cabinets that have been introduced by Ben & Jerry’s are limited and are in a testing period. The technical hurdles include a series of specificities that are still to be set by the EPA.

Through this pilot project and our active engagement with Underwriter Laboratories we gained the world’s first approval for hydrocarbons for the global standard.

Where did the interest in hydrocarbons come from? Were there any other technologies you considered?

Since the early 1990‘s Ben & Jerry’s has been taking the phaseout of CFCs and its HFC replacement seriously. Among the various refrigerant options HC was the most obvious candidate. However, before we committed ourselves to HCs we looked at thermo-acoustic refrigeration. After four years of research we found that although it was feasible it would still take another five years to become a real option. This was too long.

It was in this period that Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s. Still committed to our fundamental goal of phasing out HFCs we used the initiative to push for hydrocarbons and began using the extensive experience Unilever has with handling hydrocarbons. Unilever uses over 2 million cabinets world wide, as of early 2010 500,000 cabinets will use hydrocarbons Entrenched industry was against the introduction of hydrocarbons.

You mentioned entrenched industry, what do you mean?

The entire conventional refrigeration industry is against this from the components manufacturers, refrigerants suppliers, to those doing the service training. This resistance is accountable to a variety of reasons, but the main one is definitely a falsely propagated image that hydrocarbons are unsafe. It is this image of fear that has slowed down the adoption of HCs in the US. Slowly though the conventional wisdom is beginning to surface and people are beginning to realise the advantages of hydrocarbons.

If hydrocarbons get a SNAP approval, will there be a big market in the US?

Of course! But at the moment it is important to build up the necessary infrastructure which needs to be created from scratch. Here we have been active with the Refrigeration Service Engineers Society (RSES). We established a training programme with them some months ago (November) to lay some ground guidelines for servicing and repairing HC systems.

What does Ben & Jerry’s use in the rest of its distribution chain?

Considering the three scales of refrigeration: Industrial, Supermarkets and the Point of Sale, we try to be as environmentally minded as possible. On an industrial level Ben & Jerry’s has always been clean, as we use ammonia. However, similar with hydrocarbons we faced safety concerns but these were just out of fear. Fundamentally if you can design an entire factory around a process then there are no safety concerns. For the points of sale, if we can get a SNAP approval, we could use hydrocarbons. However, it is roof-mounted refrigeration systems at supermarkets that still cause a problem as HFCs are still widely used. For us in the industry finding an affordable solution for this is the “holy grail”.