NASA points finger toward greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride

By William Atkins
Friday, 24 October 2008 03:25

Science - Climate

New research based on a NASA-funded project shows that nitrogen trifluoride is at least four times more abundant in the atmosphere that previously thought, based on more accurate measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere.


Carbon dioxide is often pointed to as a major contributor to our warming global climate; however, nitrogen trifluoride (according to the NASA article “Potent greenhouse gas more common in atmosphere than estimated”) states, that nitrogen trifluoride “is thousands of times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal mass of carbon.”

You might be saying to yourself: What IS nitrogen trifluoride?

The answer is that nitrogen trifluoride is one of the gases that is used during the manufacturing of liquid crystal displays (LCD), also called flat-panel displays, along with thin-film solar cells and microcircuits.

The gas has been used as an alternative to perfluorocarbons in recent years because it was considered a dangerous greenhouse gas. During the manufacturing processes it was thought that very little of nitrogen trifluoride escapes into the atmosphere.

This research seems to indicate that assumption was wrong.

When it does enter the atmosphere nitrogen trifluoride is consisered to be “17,000 times more potent as a global warming agent than a similar mass of carbon dioxide.” [NASA]

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