The 46th Open-Ended Working Group Heads to Montreal to discuss HFCs

Next week, parties to the Montreal Protocol (the Protocol) will gather in Montreal – where the treaty was originally signed in 1987 - to discuss a number of climate-crucial points, including lifecycle refrigerant management, combatting illegal trade, and enhancing global efforts to better monitor controlled substances.  

The treaty’s forty-sixth meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) meets three to four months before the annual Meeting of the Parties (MOP), which will be held later this year in Bangkok. While decisions are not made during OEWG (e.g., no amendments can be voted on), the week-long meeting is used as a time for preliminary discussions on a set agenda and to help identify major topics for debate at the MOP.  

The original goal of the Montreal Protocol was to reduce the production and consumption of ozone depleting substances (ODSs), which were contributing to the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer. At the 2016 MOP in Kigali, countries agreed to amend the Protocol to include a goal of reducing the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by more than 80% over two to three decades. Since then, 159 countries have gone on to ratify the Kigali Amendment which, if implemented successfully, would mitigate HFC-emissions equivalent to more than 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide and could limit warming the remaining warming from HFCs to less than 0.06°C.  

Below are several other key topics that NRDC will be monitoring in Montreal next week. 

Combating Illegal Trade 

This year’s OEWG meeting promises a packed agenda, including a discussion around combatting illegal trade. This topic is of particular relevance to the United States, which has seen instances of illegal imports of high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants since implementation of the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act. Enacted in 2020, the AIM Act established strict limits on the production and consumption of HFCs and helped bring the US into compliance with the Kigali Amendment, which was ratified in 2022. In the weeks after the phase-down schedule entered into force, an interagency task force charged with enforcing the AIM Act blocked illegal shipments of HFCs equivalent to 530,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Earlier this year, a man was arrested in California for smuggling HFCs into the country from Mexico. Illegal trade not only undermines the phase-down schedule but also prolongs the extent to which high GWP refrigerants are utilized in equipment that continues to warm our planet.   

Lifecycle Refrigerant Management 

Lifecyle Refrigerant Management (LRM) will be a big topic of discussion at OEWG. At last year’s MOP, a decision was adopted that directed the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP) to prepare a report that documented both the available technologies to manage refrigerants, including leak prevention, recovery, recycling, reclamation, and destruction, as well as current challenges with LRM. Additionally, the decision (Decision XXXV/11) requested the Executive Committee of the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol to consider offering a window of funding for countries that have already completed their national refrigerant inventories and set forth plans for refrigerant management, including strategies to address LRM. TEAP will also share out a summary of findings from their LRM task force report, and a workshop on LRM will be held at the MOP in Bangkok.  

In 2022, NRDC released the 90 Billion Ton Opportunity: Lifecycle Refrigerant Management report that highlighted ways in which federal and state policymakers, major corporations, and equipment owners and operators can work to minimize refrigerant leaks and maximize end-of-life recovery and reclamation. According to this report, LRM can prevent fluorocarbon emissions equivalent to almost three years of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. 

HFC-23 and Enhancing Global and Regional Atmospheric Monitoring  

There is growing concern amongst scientists over a gap between reported HFC-23 emissions and amounts being measured in the atmosphere. Given this discrepancy, and as previously discussed at last year’s MOP, an additional agenda item is to discuss potential changes to reporting on HFC-23, particularly how it is generated, destroyed, or maintained as stocks. The HFC-23 gap further highlights the needs for continuous monitoring of controlled substances in the atmosphere given that parties cannot be sure progress is being made unless it is measured. This concern harkens back to several years ago when emissions of ozone-killing CFC-11 were discovered to be on the rise despite its production and use being fully phased out under the treaty. 

Earlier this year, the Ozone Secretariat – in collaboration with the Steering Committee of an EU-backed project on quantifying regional emissions of substances controlled under the Protocol – hosted an online workshop that explored the costs of expanding atmospheric monitoring. A full report on the topic will be available prior to OEWG. 

Updates from the Technology and Economic Assessment and Scientific Assessment Panels 

Several decisions were adopted at last year’s MOP that requested the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP), in coordination with the Scientific Assessment Panel (SAP), to include updated information on several key areas in its 2024 progress report. One such area was the use of controlled substances for feedstocks. The term “feedstock” refers to raw chemicals used to produce other chemicals or products. A 2022 assessment report highlighted increases in production and emissions of controlled substances used as feedstocks as well as their by-product emissions. As NRDC discussed in a previous blog post, production of HCFC-22 as a feedstock results in emissions of HFC-23 as a byproduct, which the 2022 report estimated to be as much as eight times larger than expected. Concerned by these increases, the parties have requested TEAP (in cooperation with SAP) to provide an update at the upcoming meeting on emissions related to feedstock production and use, emissions related to by-products of feedstocks, an update on the comparison between estimated emissions from reported and measured data, and updates on available alternatives and best practices for reducing emissions. 

Additionally, TEAP will share updated information on ways to better interlink the phase-down of HFCs and enhancing energy efficiency. This has increasingly become an important area of focus to maximize the climate benefits resulting from the HFC phasedown.  

NRDC is eager to see what progress parties make in these key areas and will be tracking these conversations as MOP approaches. Once OEWG concludes, we will post a follow-up blog post that details major takeaways.