Chemours breaks ground on Texas Opteon facility

Chemours broke ground this week on its new Opteon production facility at its Corpus Christi plant in Ingelside, Texas.

The plant will be the largest hydrofluoroolefins facility in the world and enable Chemours to triple its Opteon production. Opteon is a low global warming refrigerant used in automotive air conditioners and other applications.

"This new facility represents a significant step forward for Chemours as it demonstrates our commitment to providing low GWP solutions to the refrigerants industry," said Mark Vergnano, president and CEO of Chemours. "We see our Opteon products as the future for this industry since they provide the optimal balance of properties necessary to transition the world away from hydrofluorocarbons, the previous generation of refrigerants."

Opteon, which is a relatively new product for fledgling Chemours, has helped spark the company's stock resurgence. Chemours announced two high-profile sales last year to Dutch supermarket Ahold and Johnson Controls, a Milwaukee-based conglomerate. Those deals helped push Chemours' Fluoroproducts' unit's sales to $591 million in the third quarter of 2016, a 3 percent gain over the previous two quarters.

"We've already seen tremendous adoption of Opteon low GWP refrigerants; and, it's estimated that by the end of 2017, there will be over 50 million cars on the road globally using the low GWP HFO-1234yf refrigerant," said Paul Krisch, president of Chemours Fluoroproducts. "Our market projects also suggest that our Opteon refrigerants could be used in well over 10,000 supermarket and commercial refrigeration systems by 2020."

Contact Jeff Mordock at (302) 324-2786, on Twitter @JeffMordockTNJ or jmordock@delawareonline.com.