Modeling ozone formation from industrial emission events in Houston, Texas

Vizuete, William; Kim, Byeong-Uk; Jeffries, Harvey E.; Kimura, Yosuke; Allen, David T.; Kioumourtzoglou, Marianthi Anna; Biton, Leiran; Henderson, Barron H.

doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2008.05.063

Cited by 47 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This work shows that observed spatial patterns in O 3 are not being predicted in the model and future work will focus on this issue. Model performance analysis is needed through trajectory 29 and air mass 30 analyses, process analysis, [31][32][33][34][35] and source apportionment modeling experiments 36 to more robustly link emission events of known or plausible location to measured and modeled O 3 . Further study is also needed to understand how other processes (e.g., boundary layer transport phenomena) can influence NTOCs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Issues with Ozone Attainment Methodology for Houston, TX

Vizuete

Jeffries

Tesche³

et al. 2011

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

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To comply with the federal 8-hr ozone standard, the state of Texas is creating a plan for Houston that strictly follows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) guidance for demonstrating attainment. EPA's attainment guidance methodology has several key assumptions that are demonstrated to not be completely appropriate for the unique observed ozone conditions found in Houston. Houston's ozone violations at monitoring sites are realized as gradual hour-to-hour increases in ozone concentrations, or by large hourly ozone increases that exceed up to 100 parts per billion/hr. Given the time profiles at the violating monitors and those of nearby monitors, these large increases appear to be associated with small parcels of spatially limited plumes of high ozone in a lower background of urban ozone. Some of these high ozone parcels and plumes have been linked to a combination of unique wind conditions and episodic hydrocarbon emission events from the Houston Ship Channel. However, the regulatory air quality model (AQM) does not predict these sharp ozone gradients. Instead, the AQM predicts gradual hourly increases with broad regions of high ozone covering the entire Houston urban core. The AQM model performance can be partly attributed to EPA attainment guidance that prescribes the removal in the baseline model simulation of any episodic hydrocarbon emissions, thereby potentially removing any nontypical causes of ozone exceedances. This paper shows that attainment of all monitors is achieved when days with observed large hourly variability in ozone concentrations are filtered from attainment metrics. Thus, the modeling and observational data support a second unique cause for how ozone is formed in Houston, and the current EPA methodology addresses only one of these two causes. INTRODUCTIONSeveral factors combine to make Houston's ozone (O 3 ) problem unique in comparison to other metropolitan cities in the United States. These include the (1) complex interactions between land-sea breeze circulations, (2) intense clustering of industrial emission sources in the Houston Ship Channel and coastal areas, (3) significant precursor emissions from the heavily urbanized eightcounty Houston Galveston Bay (HGB) area, and (4) potential pollution transport from domestic and international source regions. The culmination of these factors has resulted in a complex and difficult environment to understand. This difficulty has garnered the attention of researchers and regulators with the common goal of understanding how O 3 is formed. The resulting science and policies of Texas regulators describe two unique causes, or conceptual models, for how high O 3 is formed in Houston. One conceptual model is a gradual region-wide increase in O 3 concentrations "typical" of many large U.S. metropolitan cities. This conceptual model is well represented in the gradual evolution of O 3 seen in observations and predicted in photochemical models. The second conceptual model was first discovered in Houston and has been linked to episodic ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Issues with Ozone Attainment Methodology for Houston, TX

Vizuete

Jeffries

Tesche³

et al. 2011

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

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“…A time series for the first year of operation of the emission event reporting system is shown in Figure 9. Although these short-lived events represented less than 10% of total annual VOC emissions from refining and chemical manufacturing in the Houston-Galveston region, during the periods when they occur, they can dominate total emissions and atmospheric photochemistry (Webster et al, 2007;Vizuete et al, 2008).…”

Section: Spatial and Temporal Variability In Emissionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Texas electrical grid, operated by the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), coal-based generation decreased from 37% of generation in 2008to 24% in 2014(ERCOT, 2009. In ERCOT, natural gas-fired units generally have lower air pollutant emissions per kilowatt hour of generation, relative to the coal plants, so when lower natural gas prices drive shifts from coal-based generation to natural gas-based generation, emissions of NO x , particulate matter (PM), sulfur oxides (SO x ), and carbon dioxide decrease (Alhajeri et al, 2011).…”

Section: Life Cycle Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emissions from oil and gas operations in the United States and their air quality implications

Allen

2016

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

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The energy supply infrastructure in the United States has been changing dramatically over the past decade. Increased production of oil and natural gas, particularly from shale resources using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, made the United States the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas in 2014. This review examines air quality impacts, specifically, changes in greenhouse gas, criteria air pollutant, and air toxics emissions from oil and gas production activities that are a result of these changes in energy supplies and use. National emission inventories indicate that volatile organic compound (VOC) and nitrogen oxide (NO x ) emissions from oil and gas supply chains in the United States have been increasing significantly, whereas emission inventories for greenhouse gases have seen slight declines over the past decade. These emission inventories are based on counts of equipment and operational activities (activity factors), multiplied by average emission factors, and therefore are subject to uncertainties in these factors. Although uncertainties associated with activity data and missing emission source types can be significant, multiple recent measurement studies indicate that the greatest uncertainties are associated with emission factors. In many source categories, small groups of devices or sites, referred to as super-emitters, contribute a large fraction of emissions. When super-emitters are accounted for, multiple measurement approaches, at multiple scales, produce similar results for estimated emissions. Challenges moving forward include identifying super-emitters and reducing their emission magnitudes. Work done to date suggests that both equipment malfunction and operational practices can be important. Finally, although most of this review focuses on emissions from energy supply infrastructures, the regional air quality implications of some coupled energy production and use scenarios are examined. These case studies suggest that both energy production and use should be considered in assessing air quality implications of changes in energy infrastructures, and that impacts are likely to vary among regions. Implications: The energy supply infrastructure in the United States has been changing dramatically over the past decade, leading to changes in emissions from oil and natural gas supply chain sources. In many source categories along these supply chains, small groups of devices or sites, referred to as super-emitters, contribute a large fraction of emissions. Effective emission reductions will require technologies for both identifying super-emitters and reducing their emission magnitudes. PAPER HISTORY

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“…Instead, we have evaluated the HARC mechanism's predictions of radical concentrations against 2006 TRAMP data, because Vizuete et al (2008) have shown that ozone formed during emission events is directly related to the amount of hydroxyl (OH) radicals produced. The TRAMP data set was previously used by Chen et al (2010) to evaluate various established chemical mechanisms, including CB05 and SAPRC.…”

Section: Model Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The hypothesis of rapid ozone formation due to regular and/or stochastic emissions of HRVOCs and NO x was eventually modified to include the mediation of HRVOC chemistry by primary emissions (as well as secondary formation) of the radical precursors, formaldehyde (HCHO), and nitrous acid (HONO), especially around the Second Texas Air Quality Study (TexAQS II) in 2006 (Olaguer et al, 2009;Vizuete et al, 2008). The results of the TexAQS II Radical and Aerosol Measurement Project (TRAMP; Lefer et al, 2010), in particular, suggested that emissions of formaldehyde from flares and other combustion sources may be substantially undercounted (or even unreported) in official emission inventories (Olaguer et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Near-source air quality impacts of large olefin flares

Olaguer

2012

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

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Large petrochemical flares, common in the Houston Ship Channel (the Ship Channel) and other industrialized areas in the Gulf of Mexico region, emit hundreds to thousands of pounds per hour of highly reactive volatile organic compounds (HRVOCs). We employed fine horizontal resolution (200 m Â 200 m) in a three-dimensional (3D) Eulerian chemical transport model to simulate two historical Ship Channel flares. The model reasonably reproduced the observed ozone rise at the nearest monitoring stations downwind of the flares. The larger of the two flares had an olefin emission rate exceeding 1400 lb/hr. In this case, the model simulated a rate of increase in peak ozone greater than 40 ppb/hr over a 12 km Â 12 km horizontal domain without any unusual meteorological conditions. In this larger flare, formaldehyde emissions typically neglected in official inventories enhanced peak ozone by as much as 16 ppb and contributed over 10 ppb to ambient formaldehyde up to $8 km downwind of the flare. The intense horizontal gradients in large flare plumes cannot be simulated by coarse models typically used to demonstrate ozone attainment. Moreover, even the relatively dense monitoring network in the Ship Channel may not be able to detect many transient high ozone events (THOEs) caused by industrial flare emissions in the absence of stagnant air recirculation or stalled sea breeze fronts, even though such conditions are unnecessary for the occurrence of THOEs.Implications: Flare minimization may be an important strategy to attain the U.S. federal ozone standard in industrialized areas, and to avoid inordinate exposure to formaldehyde in neighborhoods surrounding petrochemical facilities. Moreover, air quality monitoring networks, emission inventories, and chemical transport models with higher spatial and temporal resolution and more refined speciation of HRVOCs are needed to better account for the near-source air quality impacts of large olefin flares.

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Modeling ozone formation from industrial emission events in Houston, Texas

Cited by 47 publications

References 17 publications

Issues with Ozone Attainment Methodology for Houston, TX

Issues with Ozone Attainment Methodology for Houston, TX

Emissions from oil and gas operations in the United States and their air quality implications

Near-source air quality impacts of large olefin flares

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