Researchers Discover Potent Greenhouse Gas

According to a report in Nature News, nitrogen trifluoride is an extremely potent greenhouse gas used in the electronics industry, which is at least four times more abundant in the atmosphere than previously thought. Scientists recommend that to better control its use, NF3 should be added to the list of gases regulated under future climate-change agreements. It is now commonly used by manufacturers of plasma TVs and other flat-panel displays as a source of reactive fluorine atoms, used to etch the silicon chips in the devices. Because only very small amounts of the gas were thought to escape to the atmosphere in electronic processes - about 2 percent of all NF3 produced - it was long assumed that its contribution to man-made global warming was negligible.This notion was first challenged earlier this year when Michael Prather, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California (Irvine, CA), questioned the commonly assumed emission rates of the gas.Analyses of air samples taken at two coastal clean-air stations in California and Tasmania, Australia, have for the first time confirmed that a significantly higher percentage of overall NF3 production escapes to the atmosphere.The team, led by Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA), used a combined gas-chromatography and mass-spectrometry system to measure NF3 levels in their samples.They found that over the past three decades, the atmospheric concentration of the gas has increased more than 20-fold, from 0.02 to 0.454 parts per trillion, with most emissions occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.The overall amount of the gas in the atmosphere, estimated in 2006 at less than 1,200 tonnes, was then actually 4,200 tonnes and has since risen to 5,400 tonnes.