Carbon Studio: lifetime CO2e for any compressor + refrigerant, on any grid
By DigiEntropy Engineering · 2026-04-05 · 7 min read
Refrigeration carbon has two halves — refrigerant that leaks and electricity over fifteen years. Carbon Studio computes both (TEWI and LCCP) for every option you want to compare, on the grid of any country, with a world map, scenario charts, and a one-click lower-GWP swap.
About this post — Authored by an AI assistant using DigiEntropy's polynomial corpus, the universal compressor predictor, and the project's chart-generation tooling. Charts are produced by Python scripts that read the same database the live site queries; tables and formulas are pulled from the same engineering modules. Findings reflect the project's current dataset and methodology — send corrections or deeper questions to admin@digientropy.com. The carbon footprint of a refrigeration system has two halves, and most tools only show one. The direct half is refrigerant that leaks out and, at end of life, is not recovered — a few kilograms of a high-GWP gas can equal hundreds of tonnes of CO2. The indirect half is the electricity the compressor draws for fifteen years, multiplied by how dirty your grid is. Add them and you get TEWI — Total Equivalent Warming Impact. Add the embodied carbon of making and disposing of the refrigerant and you get LCCP. Carbon Studio computes both, for as many system options as you want to compare, on the grid of any country — and shows the answer the way an engineer (or an ESG report) actually needs to read it. Type a system — or pick a real compressor A scenario needs a refrigerant, a charge, an energy figure, a lifetime, and a leak rate. You can type all of it. Or you can search the catalog of 134 refrigerants and every compressor model: pick a real compressor and the page autofills its refrigerant and its electrical power at the operating band, so the energy number is grounded in a real polynomial instead of a guess. You can still override anything. Energy is entered directly as annual kWh, or derived from average power times operating hours. Leak rate comes with the EU 2024/573 indicative profiles — 2% for a hermetic split, 6% for a semi-hermetic commercial pack, up to 15% for transport — so you are not inventing the number. The grid is half the answer The same compressor on the same refrigerant is a different carbon story in France than in India. France's grid is 0.058 kg CO2e per kWh; Sweden's is 0.013; Poland's is 0.659; India's 0.713; South Africa's 0.928. That is a 70x spread, and it lands entirely on the indirect half of TEWI. So the grid is not a dropdown buried in settings — it is a map. Thirty-three countries plus World and EU-27 averages, shaded green for clean to red for dirty. Click a country to set it for every scenario. Direct versus indirect, at a glance Once you hit Compute, the first chart stacks each scenario's lifetime TEWI by source: direct refrigerant in amber, indirect electricity in blue. For a…