march 2009 issue
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ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE Series
The Other Emissions
When it comes to air quality, these days it seems the public’s attention is almost entirely on greenhouse gases. Alberta, meanwhile, has been making significant inroads in keeping all those other emissions in check
BY BILL CORBETT
Freelance Writer
Alberta is frequently maligned for its growing greenhouse gas emissions, notably from coal-fired power plants and expanding oilsands operations. In comparison, the overall quality of the province’s air looks positively rosy. And while greenhouse gases and air contaminants are both emitted into the atmosphere, their environmental impacts are quite different.
In fact Alberta’s overall air quality is rated as good more than 94 per cent of the time, based on the analysis of five air pollutants — carbon monoxide, particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone. The infrequent incidences of a poor rating are mostly attributable to smoke from forest fires and, to a lesser extent, smog.
While carbon dioxide emissions keep going up, concentrations of pollutants and toxins such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, benzene and lead have plummeted over the past couple of decades, particularly in major urban centres.
Emissions from individual vehicles have been reduced, but the number of cars and trucks on our roads has increased. Indeed, the overall growth of Alberta’s population and economy continue to keep pollutants on the radar of government.
Of course, there are still significant air quality concerns in Alberta. Emission of the pre-cursors involved in the formation of ground-level ozone (nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds), sulphur dioxide and particulate matter continue to rise, particularly around the oilsands region and the Edmonton area’s Industrial Heartland, due to current and proposed refineries and oilsands upgraders.
Residents close to industrial facilities ranging from sour gas wells to feedlots, or even fast-food restaurants, often have legitimate concerns about odours or potentially toxic emissions. If greenhouse gases are largely global in their impacts, air quality issues are often very local.
“Most air quality concerns are local in terms of their impacts on people, the environment and livestock,” says Bruce Peachey, P.Eng., president of Edmonton-based New Paradigm Engineering Ltd. “While the global focus has been on greenhouse gases, the major environmental driver locally has been on toxic emissions of criteria air contaminants and hydrogen sulphide.”
Most atmospheric contaminants in Alberta arise from the burning of fossil fuels — whether it’s producing coal-fired electricity, developing petroleum resources, operating vehicles, or heating homes and commercial buildings and plants. These sources all contribute to such things as greenhouse gases, acid deposition and smog.
As well, many major industrial facilities produce multiple polluting or toxic emissions, including sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and, in some cases, mercury, hydrogen sulphide, benzene and volatile organic compounds.
While global warming has drawn the spotlight away from air quality in recent years, it hasn’t always been that way. As recently as a dozen years ago, some of Alberta’s biggest environmental concerns were tied to power plant exhausts and solution gas flares burning around the province. But things began to change, spurred by the mid-1990s’ formation of the multi-stakeholder Clean Air Strategic Alliance, the introduction of tougher emissions regulations, and industry’s willingness to improve its practices.
In the upstream oil-and-gas sector, for example, flaring of solution gas — a significant contributor to sulphur dioxide emissions — has decreased by some 76 per cent since 1996, despite increased production. This is thanks to Energy Resources Conservation Board regulations and a commitment to eventually eliminate this activity from routine operations.
Over the same time, upstream emissions of carcinogenic benzene have fallen more than 80 per cent, primarily through efforts to reduce these emissions from glycol dehydrators, used to remove water from natural gas. More recent sulphur recovery requirements, which removed the grandfathering provision granted to older sour gas plants, have similarly helped slash sulphur dioxide emissions.
Over the past dozen years, vehicle emissions have also fallen significantly, largely due to federal regulations that require better pollution-control devices. For example, a 12-year-old vehicle typically produces 19 times more smog-forming emissions — such as nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter — than a 2004 or newer model.
For the petroleum industry, in particular, much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked when it comes to relatively easy, inexpensive actions to improve air quality. As a result, emissions reductions have slowed considerably in the past few years.
Although organizations such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers push best-management practices that would continue the downward emissions trend, compliance partly depends on the economic analysis and sense of social obligation of individual companies. Thus, while reducing fugitive emissions from upstream plants, for example, would also conserve natural gas, some companies might figure, say, a two-year payback for introducing new technologies might not be worth it, says Mr. Peachey.
A recently revised ERCB directive on flaring and venting in the upstream oil and gas industry, however, does set an economic threshold, above which companies must conserve solution gas. “I think industry as a whole recognizes that this issue isn’t going away, and they are willing to reduce their emissions,” says Randy Dobko, P.Eng., senior engineer in the Air Policy Section of Alberta Environment.
“We want to make sure we achieve a balance between significant emissions reductions, and economic and social concerns.”
You could say this approach is being applied to the coal-fired power industry, which accounts for about 80 per cent of Alberta’s total mercury emissions, 21 per cent of the sulphur dioxide emissions and 14 per cent of the nitrogen oxide emissions. In 2003, the Clean Air Strategic Alliance issued a framework for managing air emissions from electricity generation in Alberta. This framework, approved by the provincial government, sets emission-reduction targets for coal-fired plants, the most pressing of which is a 50 per cent cut in mercury emissions by the end of 2010.
The remaining reduction targets — 46 per cent for sulphur dioxide, 32 per cent for nitrogen oxides and 51 per cent for particulates — are set to be achieved by 2025 and are staged over that period.
In response to such targets, power companies are testing potential technologies to reduce mercury emissions, as well as looking to produce more electricity from renewable sources such as wind. Already, the new Genesee Phase 3 coal-fired facility west of Edmonton is using supercritical pressure boilers to help cut nitrogen oxide emissions in half and keep 99.8 per cent of fine particulates out of the atmosphere.
In the longer term, clean-coal technologies such as gasification promise much deeper emission cuts. Indeed, the coal-fired power sector is a good example of both regulators and industry ensuring standards not only consider health and safety but also technology improvements; this is commonly known as “best available technology economically achievable.”
Alberta’s biggest emerging air quality concern is cumulative management of emissions. “The issue at the forefront is how you regulate in times of very intensive development in small geographical areas,” says Mr. Dobko, pointing to the number of proposed industrial development applications in the Industrial Heartland. “Our minister has made it very clear that we needed to do something different than look at things on a project-by-project basis.”
As a result, Alberta Environment has proposed that all large industrial facilities within the Industrial Heartland be subject to a cumulative airshed target of 25,000 tonnes a year of nitrogen oxides and 28,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide. Further work is being done and a final announcement will be made in the near future.
In the foreseeable future, this approach of addressing cumulative effects management will also be applied to other areas of intense development in the province.
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