Regional Air Quality Impact of Natural Gas Production Operations

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

1438400EhrmanRegional Air Quality Impact of Natural Gas Production OperationsRapid expansion of natural gas (NG) production operations in the United States has irreversibly altered the energy landscape. Upsides include low cost fuel and chemical industry feedstocks, resulting in a boost to the economy and in new and expanded plant capacity. Downsides include concern about environmental degradation of groundwater, and about the impact of air emissions of air toxics and ozone forming precursors such as nitrogen oxides and reactive volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the resulting immediate impact on public health, as well as air emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This project will lead to toolsets that can be used by a variety of constituents to improve predictions of fate and transport of air pollutants, and to identify effective regulatory policy measures to reduce impact of NG operations. Products of this research will include improved understanding of vertical mixing parameterization for improved accuracy in predicting regional scale transport of area source emissions, model-ready updated emissions estimates, and well documented scenarios available for evaluating impacts of policy changes. Concerns regarding transport of area source emissions extend beyond NG operations to emissions from non-electricity generating NOx sources and vehicle emissions as well as biogenic emissions. Model-ready emissions estimates can be used by a variety of constituents including regulatory and community organizations and the oil and natural gas industry. Hands on research activities for high school and undergraduate students will support personnel development. The emphasis of this work is the Marcellus shale play but approaches and products developed will be useful for other regions of the US and world.This proposal will investigate the regional nature of emissions from NG production operations including modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The primary testable hypothesis is that ground level air emissions of even short-lived species can be significant regional sources of pollution through vertical transport and advection. Rigorous analysis of ground level and aloft aircraft measurements of methane, VOCs, NOx, and PM2.5, including those made during the NASA DISCOVER-AQ campaign will be performed. Receptor based source apportionment will be conducted for multiple sites in the mid-Atlantic region. To improve our ability to simulate regional transport, existing vertical transport parameterization schemes available within the Community-scale Modeling and Air Quality (CMAQ) platform will be evaluated for several episodes in the mid-Atlantic region of the US for 2007 and 2011. Regional ground level monitoring data will be aggregated from several states and combined with a short aircraft field campaign, using upwind and downwind spirals and plume transects to evaluate degree of agreement between our model predictions of vertical transport and downwind dispersion and measurements. Building on a long-standing cooperation with State (MD, CT, DE, NH) and regional (OTC/MANE-VU) Air Quality managers the PIs will partner to develop and evaluate possible future case scenarios.