Advancing Next Generation Emission Measurements, Novel Volatile Organic Compounds Methods, and Citizen Science
Citation:
Carlton-Carew, N., R. Duvall, I. George, Bill Mitchell, T. Wu, D. Whitaker, K. Oliver, S. Mukerjee, P. Deshmukh, J. Cansler, T. Cousett, J. Spann, T. Bell, S. Good, C. Gross-Davis, M. Fuoco, M. Miller, M. Sather, M. Stovern, J. Wilwerding, C. Beeler, B. Squier, C. Secrest, J. Dewees, AND E. Thoma. Advancing Next Generation Emission Measurements, Novel Volatile Organic Compounds Methods, and Citizen Science. 2018 EPA National Air Monitoring Conference, Portland,OR, August 13 - 16, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
This is poster to be presented at the 2018 EPA National Air Monitoring Conference in Portland, August 13-16 (https://www.epa.gov/amtic/national-ambient-air-monitoring-conference). This novel visual poster with QR-code links will provide an update on the current activities of the Next Generation Emissions Measurement (NGEM) team consisting in multiple regional field efforts.
Description:
Energy production operations, refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial and waste facilities can emit volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants and odorous species from fugitive leaks, process malfunctions, and area sources that are difficult to detect and characterize. These stochastic sources can create significant impacts to near-by populations, generating contentious issues. Enabled by the emergence of low cost sensor/model hybrids and informetrics, a revolution in source understanding and management is on the horizon. Early mitigation of stochastic sources, made possible by next generation emission measurement (NGEM) tools, will create safer working environments, cost savings through reduced product loss, lower air shed impacts, and improved community relations. In the future, higher quality information from inside a facility and at the fence line, coupled with numerous personal/home sensor and crowd-sourced data, will produce a complete picture of source emissions and near-source impacts. Ultimately, NGEM tools will help industries achieve source management objectives in more cost-effective ways, enabling alternative strategies that can reduce both operational and regulatory burden. This novel QR code-based poster visually summarizes the current efforts of the EPA NGEM team under ORD Air and Energy Task EM 1.2 and discusses how these projects couple to newly proposed near-source citizen science topics. Field deployments of novel field GCs, SPod-type fence line and MPod mobile sensors, and geospatial passive samplers for near source and community impact assessment are discussed. Cooperative research with industries on in-plant emission detection sensor networks, optical gas imaging leak detection studies, and next-gen direct source measurements for oil and gas are described.