Way cool: KU leads planet-protecting research on refrigerants
Issue 1, 2025
As kickoff celebrations go, the launch of a research center dedicated to refrigerant technology might seem anything but cool. Refrigerants, the chemical compounds that keep our homes, workplaces, automobiles, medicines and food (even that ancient beer fridge in the garage) at ideal temperatures are important, no doubt. But Marching-Jayhawks-in-full-game-day-regalia important?
Believe it.
As the daylong event marking the opening of KU’s newest research center gets underway Nov. 7 at the Burge Union, a succession of high-profile speakers step to the microphone to laud the potential of the Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub, a massive, six-university venture led by the KU School of Engineering. Funded by a $26 million federal grant, EARTH will tackle a major challenge facing the planet: how to curb one of the largest contributors to global warming—namely, the greenhouse gases and energy demand produced by our climate control systems—at a time when rising temperatures are fueling ever greater need for those systems worldwide.
Leading off the speakers, Chancellor Doug Girod hails EARTH as “game-changing in so many ways,” calling it nothing less than an ambitious attempt to develop a new industry that could boost the Kansas economy.
U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, c’76, l’82, casts the center as a remedy to the brain drain that siphons many of Kansas’ best and brightest, who often leave the state to seek jobs. “Today is one more opportunity for us to expand the opportunities for students and business and industry and increase the capabilities of our country to deal with environmental issues,” Moran says. “So it’s a win-win-win in my world, and I’m delighted to be a part of it.”
Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, which awarded the five-year grant that is among the largest in the University’s history, touts the effort’s “huge impact” on humanity. “This project is phenomenal,” Panchanathan enthuses. “What it is going to do is to unleash scientific ideas, to unleash innovation, to unleash the technology of the future and—most importantly—the industries of the future and therefore the jobs of the future, having an impact on economic, societal as well as national security—all at the same time.”
EARTH is one of only 19 Engineering Research Centers currently funded by the NSF in the fields of advanced manufacturing, energy and the environment, health, and microelectronics. The result of a highly competitive, four-year process that required a 1,000-page application, a site visit by NSF teams, and extensive collaboration among KU and its five research university partners across the country (plus multiple community and vocational colleges across the state), EARTH is headed by KU Foundation Distinguished Professor Mark Shiflett, a former DuPont researcher who joined the department of chemical and petroleum engineering in 2016 as the University’s 12th and final Foundation Distinguished Professor.
Taking his turn at the microphone, Shiflett notes the multiyear whirl of activity that has led to this celebratory moment, including consultations with faculty and students from the schools joining KU on the project, as well as with stakeholders in the heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) industry, dozens of whom are attending today. As the person ultimately responsible for delivering on the colossal promise of EARTH, Shiflett delivers his remarks in a more sober and measured tone than the speakers who preceded him. But his confidence—as he makes clear exactly what the stakes are—is just as high.
“We are going to help solve some of the most challenging engineering problems with transitioning this industry to more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient refrigerants,” Shiflett says, speaking slowly and softly. “We named it EARTH. We, all of us—all of us—live on a planet that’s called Earth, and we have to take care of it. It’s our home.”
Then, completing the vibe shift, he issues marching orders.
“Our University of Kansas band is going to play for you; when they finish, please follow them out into the foyer for some coffee and cake. And remember, we will reconvene in here at 10 a.m.”
The implication seems clear: Celebrate. Enjoy your cake. Then let’s get to work.
‘Biggest blind spot’
The imperative driving the HVACR industry to make the transition to greener technology is the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, a 2020 U.S. law that authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to phase down the production and consumption of refrigerants made with hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs, as they are known, are greenhouse gases with global warming potential (GWP) that can be hundreds or even thousands of times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.
The AIM Act grants the EPA authority to phase out the production and use of HFCs, to manage these compounds and their substitutes, and to facilitate the transition to next-generation technologies.
HFCs are widespread, as Shiflett reminds the conference attendees after the break has concluded and the special guests have departed.
Think about your own home, he says.
“In my house, I have a refrigerator in the kitchen, a refrigerator in the garage, a wine cooler, a dehumidifier, two cars parked in the garage and a heat pump outside.” All of them, Shiflett notes, contain refrigerants.
“How you traveled here, whether it was by car, plane, train: all air-conditioned,” he continues. “This room is actually being air-conditioned—in November.”
Now, think more broadly, he urges.
More than 2 billion air conditioning, refrigeration and heat pump systems are in use today, and 30% of them are in the United States, where they account for 20% to 30% of the country’s electricity consumption. Globally, about 3 billion people live in some of the hottest places on the planet, and only 8% have air conditioning. So far.
“As incomes and living standards improve around the world, the number of air conditioner, refrigeration and heat pump systems will continue to increase,” Shiflett says. “We expect over 6 billion units by 2050. That’s five new air conditioners made every second for the next 25 years.”
He pauses to let that sink in. Then he begins snapping his fingers.
“Five new air conditioners (snap). Five new air conditioners (snap). Five new air conditioners (snap).”
What happens, Shiflett asks, if the middle classes in China, India, Africa and the rest of the global south install air conditioners before we develop more environmentally friendly refrigerants? “This growing demand is the biggest blind spot in our energy debate today,” he says.
Increased CO2 emissions from the added electricity needed to power these units is only part of the problem. More than 90% of refrigerants in today’s air conditioners and other cooling devices eventually leak into the atmosphere, Shiflett explains. “Depending on the size of your house, your air conditioner contains about 5 to 10 pounds of refrigerant. If that leaks out, that’s equivalent to the CO2 emissions caused by driving your car for one year.”
Such leaks are difficult to track, too. Most homeowners notice something is wrong only when their AC stops cooling effectively, by which time the refrigerant has already escaped. HVACR technicians who lack training or who simply take shortcuts have even been known to vent a unit’s remaining refrigerant into the atmosphere when making repairs, rather than taking the extra step to capture it for reclamation or destruction.
EARTH aims to address these issues by creating a circular and sustainable refrigerant economy that:
- Recycles more than 90% of refrigerants.
- Develops new refrigerants that are environmentally safe.
- Reduces leakage to less than 1% of HVACR units, with additives that allow a system to patch itself and sensors that alert homeowners as soon as a leak starts.
- Boosts efficiency of new cooling and heating systems by 30% while reducing cost.
- Introduces refrigerators that use caloric cooling, which reduces noise, extends equipment lifespan and eliminates the need for refrigerants altogether.
- Creates 150,000 new and diverse HVACR jobs, improves training for technicians, and moves the industry away from an emphasis on fix-and-repair to preventive maintenance and energy efficiency.
- Establishes the United States as the technology and export leader of an industry that is projected to reach $1 trillion.
“I want to see the United States remain the leader in air conditioning and refrigeration,” Shiflett says during an interview in his lab at the School of Engineering’s Learned Engineering Expansion Phase 2 (LEEP2) building. “I want to see us be the leader in the technology and the leader in the exports. Too often, in my lifetime, I’ve seen the opposite. The solar industry left, right? Maybe it’s starting to slowly trickle back, but I don’t want to see that happen to air conditioning and refrigeration. I started as a 21-year-old working in this field, and obviously worked on a lot of different things in between. But now here at the end of my career, I want to see us develop something that goes beyond the technology we have today for comfort cooling. And I’d love to think that in 10 years I could be buying something that I’m installing in my home or walking into a commercial building or walking into a grocery store and be like, ‘Wow. We did it.’”
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Sustainability: A common thread
Shiflett began working part time at DuPont in 1987, while an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, moving to full time after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1989. The Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the use of chemicals that were leading to depletion of the stratospheric layer that protects Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, had just taken effect, and DuPont was developing new products to replace materials banned by the agreement, including the chemical compounds used in supermarket refrigeration. One of Shiflett’s mentors, a senior engineer, was assigned the job, but he was busy developing a chemical that would be used to retrofit automobiles.
“He said, ‘Hey, why don’t you take a look at this?’” Shiflett recalls. “I was 21. I didn’t know a lot about refrigerants, didn’t know a lot about supermarket refrigeration, and all of a sudden this is my job.”
He invented several refrigerants, three of which DuPont commercialized. One of those, R-404A, earned the company over $1 billion in sales and is still used in the supermarket industry worldwide. (A hydrofluorocarbon developed to replace banned chlorofluorocarbons, it is now one of the refrigerants being phased out under the AIM Act.)
“If I go to Dillons or Hy-Vee, and I go to the frozen food case and I open the doors up and pull the packages aside, I can find a metal tag somewhere inside that unit, and on that tag it’ll say the name of the refrigerant that I invented,” Shiflett says.
A big grin spreads across his face. In it, there’s a hint of his boyhood enthusiasm for building model trains, planes and rockets, which led Shiflett to choose a college major inspired by the space program and by Neil Armstrong’s declaration that he was proud to be an engineer.
“After almost 40 years, I’m excited by that,” he says of the cold-case deep dive he still indulges in from time to time—much to his wife’s chagrin, he jokes. “You can’t pay me enough money to get the feeling I get when I see that and know it’s something I created that made a difference.
“That’s the exact same thing that I’m trying to instill in every one of these young students, that you can make a difference with an idea, an invention. You can do that. And with these folks across KU and the other universities, I’m hoping to lead them through something like that, so that we can make a real difference, make a real change.”
It’s a message that resonates with students, says Kalin Baca, PhD’23, who came to KU specifically to study with Shiflett.
“Mark has an extremely unique perspective because he worked for DuPont for 28 years prior to coming to academia, and he had a really good understanding of how to commercialize technology and how to develop products,” Baca says. “He’s the inventor on many of the refrigerants that we use today. Because of that experience, he came in with a much different perspective than you oftentimes see.
“Mark is not afraid to dream big, and he works harder than anyone I’ve ever met,” she adds. “He’s also extremely passionate about not only the development of these technologies and having a positive impact on society, but he’s extremely passionate about the development and growth of people. His superpower is his availability. It’s that combination that makes him perfect for this role leading the center.”
While at DuPont, Shiflett returned to school to earn a master’s and doctorate in chemical engineering. He worked on a string of projects, from hydrogen fuel cells to environmentally friendly paint pigments to renewable tires, racking up more than 40 U.S. patents, eventually earning election to the National Academy of Inventors. Finding that he particularly enjoyed mentoring DuPont interns, he reached out to the University of Delaware and began teaching part time in 2011. In 2016 he retired from DuPont and came to KU, bringing with him millions of dollars worth of donated lab equipment from the company.
At the School of Engineering, he continued the emphasis on sustainability that had formed a common thread throughout his DuPont projects. In 2017, Shiflett read a story about The Wonderful Company, and he reached out to KU Endowment to ask whether they had any contacts at the multibillion-dollar food conglomerate. As it happened, a KU alumnus, Eric Johnson, e’89, is senior vice president for capital projects at the company.
“We had a really good meeting,” Shiflett says of the introduction that followed. “We hit it off.”
That initial conversation led to a gift from Wonderful that allowed Shiflett to work on refrigeration projects for the company.
“Then we started to look at what some of their byproducts were, and we realized they’re the largest producer of pistachios in the world. They make about a hundred million pounds of pistachios every year, and they have this thing called ‘the 3-mile pile,’ which is a pile of pistachio shells that stretches 3 miles. You could fill Allen Field House with those shells—and that’s every year.”
Shiflett and his students set out to find a use for these discards. After a couple of false starts, they determined that the shells contain a compound called polyphenols, which can be used to improve the gut health of animals. With research studies confirming the efficacy of this approach, and a $5 million gift from Wonderful co-founders Stewart and Lynda Resnick, The Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering (WISE-KU) began helping transform a waste-management dilemma into a valuable food additive for the pork, aquaculture and pet food industries.
“Environmental sustainability must be one of the priorities for our planet and is a primary focus of our company’s operations,” Johnson said in February 2024, when the gift was announced. “Succeeding in our efforts to care for our world requires research and innovation—everything from renewable energy and responsible water usage to rethinking pistachio waste. The Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering at KU has taken a novel approach towards exploring new technologies and creating cutting-edge outputs that align with Wonderful’s mission to make our world a safer, healthier and better home for generations to come.”
The search for “a novel approach” will be a hallmark of the EARTH Engineering Research Center, too—as demonstrated by its first spinoff company, Icorium Engineering, co-founded in 2022 by Shiflett and Baca. Headquartered at KU Innovation Park on West Campus, the startup licensed a patent from KU for its novel process for reclaiming outdated and mixed refrigerants and is now in the process of bringing the technique to market on an industrial scale. (See “Homegrown innovation,” below.)
Light bulb moment
Shiflett has worked hard to transfer the corporate ethos of constant innovation and development to his research and teaching at KU.
“DuPont was probably one of the first companies to establish sustainability goals when sustainability wasn’t something people were talking about very much, and it was the kind of company that wanted us in research to dream big,” he says. “I’ve tried to instill that in my students: You will run into obstacles and barriers, but you’ve just got to keep trying, and there’s nothing too big that you can dream that you can’t possibly do.”
America may have lost the initiative in allowing other countries to dominate the solar industry, but another past scenario offers a model for how the country might lead the way in tackling the energy transition mandated for the HVACR industry: the move to LED lighting.
As things stand now, Shiflett says, “We have the opportunity to do what happened when we went from the incandescent light bulb to fluorescents to LEDs.”
Light bulbs and electronics made with light-emitting diodes use one-tenth of the electricity and produce one-tenth of the heat of an incandescent bulb for the exact same amount of light, Shiflett explains. “That has revolutionized lighting. Everything now is moving to LED because the cost has come down. It’s affordable. They last for decades, and it’s just incredible what we’ve accomplished in the last 25 years with lighting.
“When I worked at DuPont back in the late ’80s, we were talking about LEDs then, and they were these tiny little things that you thought, ‘How could that ever be a TV screen or be powerful enough to be used as a light bulb?’ And now they’re everywhere.
“That’s the kind of thing we want to do for air conditioning.”
Back at Burge, as the players in the KU-led EARTH initiative ponder the challenge before them, Shiflett offers some bracing straight talk.
It won’t be easy, he warns.
“I can’t tell you what the invention is today, but I can tell you that this group, along with our industry partners and our other stakeholders and the national labs, we are going to figure this out. We are going to make air conditioning and refrigeration sustainable and use a lot less electricity than we use today.”
Even if one of the 10 EARTH projects now in development is commercialized, Shiflett tells his audience, there is the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Even if none of those come to fruition, stakeholders have told him, the assistance they gain with workforce and diversity training will make EARTH a success.
“We believe EARTH can transform the status quo into an Earth-inspired future where over 90% of refrigerants are recycled rather than ending up in the atmosphere,” Shiflett says, his gaze roaming the room to make eye contact with attendees as he rallies them for the monumental task that awaits, sketching out a road map for how they might get there: Sensors and self-healing additives will reduce leakage to less than 1% of HVACR systems. Air conditioners and heat pumps will be less expensive and up to 30% more energy efficient. Refrigerators will use solid-state refrigerants that eliminate the need for gaseous refrigerants, operate silently and last longer. Over 150,000 new jobs will be created to meet the goals of the AIM Act.
“EARTH will help enable that,” Shiflett says, “and the United States will remain the technology leader and the export leader as we build a trillion-dollar industry.”
Believe it.
KU leads broad partnership
The $26 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant that funded EARTH establishes KU as the lead institution of a six-university team that also includes Lehigh University, the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, the University of Maryland, the University of Notre Dame and the University of South Dakota. In addition, 11 community colleges, four HVACR tech schools, and four two- and four-year colleges will participate, among them Johnson County Community College, Metropolitan Community College, Peaslee Tech, Salina Tech and Seward County Community College.
The five-year project, which can be renewed for another five years if goals are met, also involves dozens of industry stakeholders, national labs, professional organizations and regulatory agencies. Contributors in attendance at the November kickoff meeting and celebration included:
- Leading manufacturers of heating, air conditioning and refrigeration systems such as Carrier, Daikin, Johnson Controls and Trane.
- Leading refrigerant manufacturers such as Arkema and Chemours.
- Multinational companies Microsoft, which depends heavily on cooling systems to keep its many data centers operating, and Walmart, which operates about 5,000 stores and 50 supply chain facilities in the U.S. alone and has pledged to achieve a goal of zero emissions by 2040.
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which supports U.S. Department of Energy efforts to help industry navigate the refrigerant transition mandated by the AIM Act.
- Refrigerant reclamation companies such as American Refrigerants, Chiller Services and Hudson Technologies, which are searching for new ways to recycle and reuse outdated refrigerants.
Homegrown innovation
The potential impact of the new EARTH center could be comparable to the economic and public relations boost delivered by another high-profile Kansas win, the new Panasonic EV battery factory in De Soto, says U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran.
“I look at the Panasonic arrival as a role model for others,” Moran, c’76, l’82, told Kansas Alumni. “‘Panasonic came to Kansas, what did they find there? Maybe we should look and see what they saw.’ Same thing here.”
As the center’s research developments are commercialized and present new business opportunities, “presumably that’s going to develop here,” Moran said. “That helps us not only educate students, but create careers and opportunities for them and their families to remain in Kansas.”
An early example of just such potential is Icorium Engineering Company, a spinoff founded in 2022 by Mark Shiflett and one of his doctoral students, Kalin Baca, PhD’23.
A climate tech startup that is pursuing one of EARTH’s key goals—to create a circular economy for refrigerants—Icorium uses new solvents (ionic liquids) and a process called extractive distillation to separate phased-out refrigerants into their component parts, which can then be recycled or repurposed. Headquartered at KU Innovation Park on West Campus, the company has used KU equipment and technology to establish that its process works for the top-three commercial refrigerant mixtures at lab and pilot scale. It’s currently evaluating potential sites in Kansas and elsewhere for a commercial demonstration plant. Construction is projected to begin in 2025.
“We already have eight employees,” Baca says, “and by putting up a commercial demonstration plant, that’s a lot of jobs and talent you could be keeping here in Kansas as well.” The technology has applications far beyond Kansas and the United States, she notes. “Refrigerants are used globally. I could easily see us being a 50-employee company by 2029. One plant could easily be a $100 million net revenue potential here in the U.S. alone.”
Icorium was one of five KU-affiliated startups to share in a $570,000 investment by members of Oread Angel Investors, a new network of KU alumni, faculty and friends launched by KU Innovation Park. The network held its first pitch event last November; the second is scheduled for March.
Partners in Oread Angel Investors include the Kansas Department of Commerce, the University of Kansas, the KU Alumni Association and the Digital Health Co/Lab of KU Medical Center. The network is sponsored by Polsinelli, a national law firm.
Steven Hill is associate editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
Photos by Steve Puppe
EARTH kickoff event photos by Meg Kumin/KU Marketing
Map courtesy of Mark Shiflett
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