7.1 Transcritical CO2

Background

Transcritical CO2 made its first mark in Europe in the supermarket industry, with the first transcritical CO2 multi-compressor system installed at a Bingo supermarket in Cornuda, Italy, in 2001.111

With the introduction of the EU F-gas Regulation in 2006, later updated in 2014, and in the process of another revision, Europe has become the world’s leader in supermarket installations of transcritical CO2. And in the past three years, larger transcritical CO2 systems have gained traction in the European industrial refrigeration market as an alternative to ammonia and f-gas refrigerants in cold-storage, food processing and other facilities.

That transition has been helped by the development of industrial-sized compressors by manufacturers like Dorin. In 2018, Giovanni Dorin, marketing manager at the Italian company, correctly observed that transcritical CO2 technology was poised to take off in industrial applications within the next three to five years.112

For example, in June 2019, BrewDog, a Scottish multinational brewer, commissioned a transcritical CO2 refrigeration system from Star Refrigeration at its Eurocentral cold-storage facility in Scotland.109 Also in 2019, the Technical University of Munich (TUM) installed an industrial CO2 solution from German OEM TEKO.77

The Market Today

ATMOsphere’s June 2020 data collection from OEMs found 1,450 industrial sites in Europe using transcritical CO2 (5% of the 29,000 CO2 installations counted in Europe at the time).

Based on interviews with key OEMs, the majority of these installations were for the cold storage application.

As of March 2021, this number of industrial transcritical CO2 installations in Europe was estimated to be 1,640 (4% of the 40,000 transcritical CO2 sites).

Based on our 2022 survey of key OEMs, the number of industrial sites with transcritical CO2 in Europe. as of September 2022, was 2,000 (3.5% of the 57,000 transcritical CO2 sites).