FluoroFusion

Brad Kivlan, Chief Operating Officer

Start with something that surprises most people outside our industry. Refrigerant is not fuel. It does not get used up. It circulates inside a sealed system, and unless it leaks out, the same chemical is still in there twenty years later. When equipment gets serviced or retired, that chemical can be pumped out and used again.

We have been doing exactly that for about thirty years, but only with the simple stuff. If a refrigerant is a single chemical, one molecule, then recovering it and cleaning it back to purity is routine work. The industry calls that reclamation. It has run at commercial scale since the 1990s and there is nothing new about it.

The problem has always been blends.

Why Blends were A Dead End

Most refrigerants sold over the last two decades are not one chemical. They are mixtures of two, three or four different molecules held at a fixed ratio, engineered to deliver a specific performance. The ratio is the product. Get the ratio wrong and you no longer have the product.

Once a blend comes out of equipment, it usually is not at that ratio anymore. Leaks change it, because the components escape at different rates. Technicians top systems off with whatever is on the truck. Recovery cylinders get filled with more than one thing. What comes back matches nothing on any label.

You cannot filter a blend back into the right proportions. Cleaning does not fix a ratio problem. So for thirty years the answer to recovered blends was destruction. That bill did not land on the equipment owner. Reclaimers absorbed it: we took in material, found it was an unusable mixture and paid to have it incinerated. Usable molecules went up the stack because nobody could pull them apart economically, and the cost of doing that sat quietly inside the price of everything else.

That arrangement worked while the new refrigerant was cheap and unlimited. It is neither of those now.

The Supply is Capped by Law

The federal government issues a limited number of allowances each year to produce or import these chemicals, and it cuts that number on a published schedule, heading toward roughly 85 percent below historical levels by 2036. Demand does not follow that schedule. The chillers, supermarket cases, refrigerated trailers and process cooling systems already installed will run another fifteen to twenty years and every one of them needs service gas.

Regulation is closing the gap directly. Leak repair requirements for larger systems took effect at the start of 2026. Automatic leak detection reaches existing industrial and commercial refrigeration systems in 2027. In 2028, refrigerant has to be emptied out of certain disposable cylinders before they can be thrown away. And starting January 1, 2029, servicing supermarket systems, refrigerated transport and commercial ice machines has to be done with reclaimed refrigerant rather than new.

Read those dates as a purchasing schedule, not a compliance schedule.

The 2029 rule guarantees that somebody will need a reclaimed product. It guarantees nothing about there being any. Reclaimed volume comes from one place: refrigerant physically pumped out of equipment in the field and delivered to a certified reclaimer. That is a labor and logistics problem, not a chemistry problem, and it is being solved or not solved right now by what happens on service calls in 2026 and 2027.

Every pound vented, contaminated or left sitting in a cylinder in the back of a van is a pound nobody can buy in 2029 at any price.

Check What You are Buying

Tight supply attracts bad products. Material reaches this market that does not meet AHRI 700, the industry purity standard, including cylinders whose contents do not match the label. That cost lands on the buyer as failed compressors, contaminated recovery equipment and warranty fights. Require a certificate of analysis against AHRI 700 for the specific batch you are buying, every time. A supplier who will not put that in writing has already answered the question.

Separation Changes the Arithmetic

This is the work we do at FluoroFusion. Our fractionation technology takes mixed and contaminated material and separates it back into its individual chemicals. Once separated, each one is equivalent to newly manufactured products and can be blended into whatever the market needs, including the newer, lower global warming potential refrigerants. The incinerator stops being the destination, and the molecules stay in circulation instead of leaving it permanently.

That is the difference between recycling a product and rebuilding a supply chain, and it is why our nine issued patents sit in separation and blend chemistry rather than in equipment. It is also why we run a national network of Carbon Reduction Centers. Collection has to be close to the job. If recovery is inconvenient it does not happen, and material that is not recovered is gone for good.

Four Things Worth Doing This Year

1. Count what you have. Know how much refrigerant sits in your equipment and which type. Most organizations cannot produce that number, and everything else depends on it.

2. Give recovery a name and a target. Treat it the way you treat scrap or yield, with one
accountable owner.

3. Demand batch analysis in writing from every supplier, on every purchase.

4. Stop treating recovered refrigerant as something to get rid of. It is a capped raw material. Value it, track it and secure it the way you would any other input you cannot easily replace.

None of this needs new legislation or new capital. It needs a decision that the material has value, made before the market makes the point for you.