Contents Notes |
New Source Performance Standards for large coal-fired boilers and certain State Implementation Plans require operators to monitor SOb2s flue gas emissions. As an alternative to stack gas monitoring, sampling and analysis of feed coal has been proposed to estimate SOb2s emissions. This report provides information on coal sampling and analysis (CSA) techniques and procedures and presents a statistical model for estimating SOb2s emissions. In particular, this study assesses the various coal sampling techniques and equipment, the various sample preparation and analytic methods, and common practices for CSA. It describes the variables associated with the prediction of SOb2s emissions from CSA data; e.g., sulfur retention, variability, measuring errors, and auto-correlation. Finally, it presents a time series model for predicting emissions which takes into consideration the correlation of the sulfur content of the coal, the measuring errors, and the sampling procedures for coal collection. The model is used to fit 53 data sets with little evidence of non-fit. |