Refrigerant supply for pharmaceutical plants

What actually gets cooled

Walk a formulation or bulk-drug site and the cooling load divides into four jobs, each with its own refrigerant habits.

The awkward one is process chilling. A great deal of chiller plant commissioned in the 1990s and 2000s runs on R-22 and is still perfectly serviceable. It remains entirely legal to run and to service — what ended on 1 January 2025 was the manufacture of new equipment charged with R-22. So the question for a plant engineer is not whether they may keep the machine, but whether they can reliably get gas for it. That answer is here.

Why documentation is the differentiator

In most industries a refrigerant invoice is an expense line. In pharmaceuticals it is a record that an auditor may ask to see, because the equipment it relates to sits inside a qualified environment.

India's revised Schedule M raised expectations around qualification and temperature mapping for storage and manufacturing areas. Where a cold room or stability chamber has been qualified, anything that changes its behaviour — including a refrigerant charge — belongs in a record. WHO guidance on storage and distribution pushes the same way.

What that means in practice when you buy gas:

• The invoice must name the exact refrigerant, not a generic description
• Quantity in kilograms, tied to a batch or cylinder identifier
• A current, product-specific Safety Data Sheet
• A supplier who can produce their own registrations on request, not eventually

We are a distributor, not a filling plant or a testing laboratory. The purity conformity that matters is the manufacturer's, published by them — we supply original sealed cylinders sourced directly from manufacturers, Stallion and Refron (GFL), and pass their documentation through unaltered.

The emissions angle your ESG team already knows about

If your site belongs to a listed group, the refrigerant that leaks out of your chillers is being reported. Fugitive refrigerant is a Scope 1 emission, disclosed under BRSR Principle 6, and BRSR Core assessment has been widening year by year through the listed universe.

The number is simple and unforgiving: kilograms lost multiplied by the gas's global warming potential. A hundred-kilogram R-134a chiller losing fifteen percent of its charge in a year emits roughly 21.5 tonnes of CO₂e. Your purchase records are the cleanest evidence of that quantity, which is why procurement and sustainability increasingly ask the same supplier the same question. How refrigerant leaks hit your Scope 1 sets out the arithmetic and the reporting.

Continuity, and the Hyderabad advantage

A pharmaceutical plant cannot wait a fortnight for a cylinder. A stability chamber drifting out of range is a deviation; a cold room losing temperature is a batch investigation.

We are based at Ranigunj in Secunderabad, inside the same city as the bulk-drug and formulation belt — Jeedimetla, Balanagar, Bollaram, Patancheru, Pashamylaram, Gaddapotharam, the Medak and Sangareddy corridors, and the life-sciences cluster at Shamirpet. For most of those sites we are a same-day collection or a short dispatch, not a freight problem. Beyond Telangana, supply is Pan-India. The cluster map is here.

For R-22 specifically, the licence matters: we hold ODS seller registration ODS/CS/17/6(12)/2024-OC dated 12.11.2024 from the Ozone Cell, which is what permits lawful servicing supply. A vendor-qualification team can verify that independently rather than take it on trust.

Related: Refrigerant leaks and Scope 1 · Telangana clusters · R-134a supply · SDS & data sheets