photo by: University of Kansas

Mark Shiflett, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering and director of the Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering, University of Kansas, will lead the EARTH Center.

Story updated at 5:12 p.m. Aug. 21:

The University of Kansas has won a $26 million federal grant — one of its largest in history — to help develop new technologies that will make everything from air conditioners to refrigerators more environmentally friendly.

The National Science Foundation has awarded KU $26 million to develop an Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub. The cutting edge research center will work to develop new types of refrigerants that are kinder to the environment

“It will be a big research center here,” said Mark Shiflett, who will serve as the center’s director and is currently a KU distinguished professor in chemical and petroleum engineering.

Work across the world is already underway to develop and implement a new class of refrigerants that don’t contribute to global warming in the same way that the current class of products do. Refrigerants — the fluids used in all types of cooling devices — are estimated to account for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions currently.

Development of those new products is expected to make the refrigerant business a $1 trillion industry in the future, Shiflett said in an interview with the Journal-World. KU is now positioned well to be one of the U.S. research leaders in that huge field.

Shiflett said 28 private companies in the heating and cooling industry have already said they want to join the center because they think KU and its partners will be key in making the industry more sustainable.

“And these are big HVAC companies,” Shiflett said of the industry partners, which have not yet been publicly named.

The center, which KU has given the acronym of EARTH, will be located in existing space inside the engineering school complex on KU’s main campus, Shiflett said. The center, which will be operational this fall, will have at least 12 faculty and research staff members on the KU campus, plus the university will hire several administrative positions to help oversee the entire program, which includes work that will be done at six partner research institutions across the country.

While KU is the lead institution on the project, it has partners at the University of Notre Dame, University of Maryland, University of Hawaii, University of South Dakota and Lehigh University. Shiflett said the entire project is expected to include 42 faculty members from 16 academic disciplines. It also will partner with 22 community and technical colleges to help train future employees for the refrigeration industry. The KU campus will serve as the overall headquarters for the enterprise, Shiflett said.

At the helm of the operation will be Shiflett, who already is a pioneer in the industry. Shiflett spent nearly 30 years at the chemical giant DuPont, where he was the inventor of a new refrigerant that became used around the world in supermarket freezers. That product had more than $1 billion in sales for DuPont at the time Shiflett left the company in 2016 to join the faculty at KU.

Shiflett is currently the director of the Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering, another KU center that recently has been in the news. As the Journal-World reported in November, KU named the center after The Wonderful Company, which is the $5 billion privately held California company that is the world’s largest grower of pistachios, owner of the Halo brand of mandarin oranges, and the owner of the Fiji water brand, among others.

Importantly, the owners of the Wonderful Company — Stewart and Lynda Resnick — are some of the largest university donors in the country, with a particular emphasis on funding sustainability projects. The couple in 2019 made a $750 million pledge to the California Institute of Technology, which houses a sustainability institute named after the family.

With KU having its own sustainable engineering institute already in place, the university is now getting another level of support by winning the NSF grant, which more than a hundred other universities sought for a host of advanced research projects.

KU and state leaders on Wednesday were touting the importance of the federal grant award.

“Working closely with industry partners, EARTH will have the resources and expertise to solve the technical, environmental and economic challenges required to create a sustainable refrigerant lifecycle that will benefit Kansans, the nation and the world,” KU Chancellor Douglas Girod said in a press release. “In doing this work, the center is a prime example of how the University of Kansas is driving economic development in Kansas.”

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, is a member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds the NSF. He said the grant is an important one in keeping the United States competitive in an important industry.

“This new research center will allow Kansans to lead the way in developing the next generation of refrigerant technology, increasing U.S. competitiveness in an important technology and industry,” Moran said via a press release.

For Shiflett, the grant is a major milestone years in the making, he told the Journal-World.

“It is a dream come true,” Shiflett said. “I really love working with students and helping get their careers started.”

Some of those students will be working to replace the very invention that Shiflett brought to the industry while at DuPont. While that class of refrigerant was a major environmental upgrade at the time, new technologies likely can produce even more environmentally friendly products. Plus, the center will be looking to break ground on how to recycle refrigerants and reduce energy usage in the industry, among other projects.

Shiflett is now looking forward to students at the center becoming the highlight of his career, even over and above the 46 patents he’s been awarded for inventions.

“I kind of see in the early part of my career I was fortunate to be able to invent and develop products,” Shiflett said. “And now, in the latter part of my career, I’m fortunate to be able to develop people.”