How refrigerant leaks become Scope 1 emissions

Why a leak is an emissions event

A refrigeration circuit is a closed loop that is never quite closed. Gas escapes through joints, shaft seals, valve stems and the slow fatigue of brazed connections, and every kilogram that escapes is a greenhouse gas released directly by equipment you operate. In greenhouse-gas accounting that is a Scope 1 emission — the same category as fuel burnt in your own boilers, and quite separate from the Scope 2 electricity the chiller consumes.

This catches people out, because a refrigerant leak produces no smoke, no meter reading and no invoice line item beyond the top-up itself. The only trace it leaves is the quantity of gas you had to buy to put it back. That makes your purchase records the primary evidence of an emission you are obliged to disclose — which is why the paperwork around refrigerant supply has quietly become an accounting matter rather than just a compliance one.

The conversion, in one line

Every refrigerant carries a Global Warming Potential: how much heat it traps over a hundred years relative to the same mass of carbon dioxide. Multiply the mass lost by that figure and you have the emission.

A worked example. A chiller holding 100 kg of R-134a that loses 15% of its charge in a year has leaked 15 kg. At a GWP of 1,430 that is 21.45 tonnes of CO₂e — from one machine, invisibly, over twelve months. Put the same leak on an R-404A pack and the figure becomes 58.8 tonnes, because R-404A traps nearly three times as much heat per kilogram.

That comparison is the whole argument for refrigerant selection as an emissions decision rather than purely an engineering one. It is also why the numbers reward attention: a modest reduction in leak rate on a high-GWP system moves more tonnes than most efficiency projects.

One caveat on which GWP figure to use. India's national inventory and most corporate reporting work from IPCC AR4 (2007) values, which is what the table above shows. Some frameworks have moved to AR5, where R-410A is 1,924 rather than 2,088 and R-134a is 1,300 rather than 1,430. State which set you have used; auditors care more about consistency and disclosure than about which vintage you picked. Both sets are laid out here.

Where it lands in Indian reporting

For listed Indian companies, refrigerant leakage surfaces in the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report under Principle 6, the environmental principle, within the greenhouse-gas disclosures. SEBI introduced a subset called BRSR Core — a smaller set of attributes, including greenhouse-gas intensity, that carries an assessment or assurance requirement rather than being self-declared.

BRSR Core has been phasing in by market capitalisation: the top 150 listed entities from FY2023-24, the top 250 from FY2024-25, the top 500 from FY2025-26 and the top 1,000 from FY2026-27. A March 2025 SEBI circular softened parts of the regime — substituting “assessment or assurance” for assurance alone, and making value-chain ESG disclosure voluntary — but the direction is unchanged.

The practical consequence is that a number which used to be estimated loosely now has to survive a third party looking at it. Unlisted suppliers feel this second-hand: if you sell into a listed customer's value chain, their assessor's questions eventually reach you.

How to estimate what you actually leaked

The GHG Protocol's refrigeration and air-conditioning guidance offers three methods, in descending order of accuracy.

Almost every organisation starting out lands on the screening method and then discovers the sales-based method is available to them after all — because their refrigerant purchase invoices already contain the data. That is the cheapest accuracy upgrade in the exercise: the gas you bought to recharge a system is the gas that leaked out of it.

What leak rates look like in practice

US EPA data gives the most-cited benchmarks. They are American figures and Indian conditions differ, but as an order-of-magnitude sense check they are the best public reference available.

The pattern is consistent: the more joints, the longer the pipe runs and the more service interventions a system sees, the more it leaks. A packaged unit that was brazed once in a factory holds its charge. A supermarket rack with hundreds of metres of pipework and a dozen cases does not.

If you are topping up the same machine every season, you do not have a charging problem. You have a leak, and it is being reported as an emission whether or not anyone writes it down.

What your supplier should be giving you

Auditable Scope 1 figures need auditable inputs, and a refrigerant distributor is one of the few external parties who can supply them. What makes a purchase record usable in a greenhouse-gas inventory:

• A dated invoice stating the exact refrigerant — not “gas”, but R-410A or R-407C, since the GWP multiplier depends entirely on which
• The quantity in kilograms, so the arithmetic needs no assumptions about cylinder size
• Batch or cylinder traceability, linking what you charged to what you bought
• A product-specific Safety Data Sheet that confirms composition
• For R-22, the record-keeping a registered ODS seller is required to maintain in any case

None of that is exotic — it is what ordinary documented supply looks like. But it is precisely what an undocumented cash purchase from an unverified seller cannot give you, and a counterfeit or mislabelled cylinder makes the emission figure wrong at source. If the cylinder said R-134a and contained something else, the GWP you multiplied by was the wrong number.

We supply against invoice with documentation available for every line, sourced directly from manufacturers — Stallion and Refron (GFL). What a legitimate supplier provides sets out the full list.

Related: GWP values compared · Supplier documentation · Pharma supply · Data centre supply