Coega safe gas scheme
South Africa could become the first country on the continent to produce environmentally friendly refrigeration and air conditioning gases, and Coega is the ideal site for such a plant, the Department of Environmental Affairs said yesterday.
Senior official Obed Baloyi said South Africa imported hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from 50 different companies to meet the country’s refrigeration, aerosol propellant, foam manufacture and air conditioning requirements.
“Right now we are taking in 3 000 tons, but we are reducing quotas by 5% a year and should have phased them out by 2025.
“So now we have an opportunity to develop environmentally friendly alternatives.
“We have suggested Coega as a possible site.”
Baloyi, director of the Hydrofluorocarbons Phase-out Management Plan Roadshow, which was in Port Elizabeth yesterday, said the project would need uptake from the department and from industry.
The envisaged plant would also position South Africa in an ideal position to shrug off reliance on overseas producers of HFCs and to move instead to gases which damaged neither the ozone nor the climate.
He said environmentally friendly refrigerants could include gases like carbon dioxide, ammonia and HFOs (hydrofluoro-olefins).
HFCs came into use after the 1985 discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, and the identification of chorofluorcarbon (CFC) as the culprit.
However, HFCs are also potent greenhouse gases and as the climate change crisis emerged, it became clear that this option too would have to be phased out.
Also speaking at the roadshow, Casper Labuschagne, of the South African Weather Service, highlighted a sinister blast from the past.
A new US report says unexplained volumes of CFC-11 – the gas with the second most powerful ozone depletion potential – are starting to reappear in the atmosphere.
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