How the R-32 Duty Stops at Eighty-Five Percent

There is a number in the scope of the R-32 antidumping order that appears on no refrigerant spec sheet anywhere: eighty-five percent.

It is a threshold, and it decides which drums of Chinese material CBP taxes and which ones it waves through. Commerce renewed that order on August 4, six and a half years after Arkema filed the petition, and the scope came through the sunset review word for word unchanged.

The market underneath it did not.

"When the residential fleet moved from R-410A to R-454B, did the duty move with it?"

What Commerce Renewed

The mechanics were quiet to the point of being invisible. The ITC instituted the first five-year review on February 2, one domestic interested party filed a notice of intent to participate, and no respondent interested party filed a substantive response at all.

Nobody on the Chinese side showed up.

That triggers the expedited track under 19 CFR 351.218, and an expedited sunset is a paper exercise. Commerce reached back to the original investigation and found the margins likely to prevail on revocation were weighted-average dumping margins up to 221.06 percent, which is the China-wide rate from 2021 restated.

The ITC published its injury determination August 4, Commerce published the continuation August 11, and CBP was instructed to keep collecting at the rates already in effect. The next review gets initiated no later than thirty days before the fifth anniversary of that determination, so the wall stands until roughly August 2031.