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Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | New WHO guidelines will go to heart of European policy If you saw our Designer Diesels supplement last month you’ll be aware that there’s some scratching of heads in this heavily dieselised continent about particulate matter pollution. The World Health Organisation has just issued its first Air Quality Update since 1997. It’s the agglomeration of science that is at the heart of air quality policy in the US and Europe. And one of the specific aims of the working group behind it has been for the new update to facilitate more successfully public health measures to curtail harmful particulate matter. Therefore it can be expected to inform considerably the debate in the European Parliament as important policy measures such as Directive on Ambient Air and Cleaner Air for Europe (2005/447) come before it. That directive is an attempt to simplify and pull together a number of earlier directives and it can be expected to affect almost anyone who burns anything, and that includes process plants and their permit applications. Particulate matter emissions are highly irritating to respiratory or cardiovascular illness sufferers, fuels and vehicles industry advocates, and, especially, to city policy makers across Europe. PM emissions send a few hundred thousand of the first two groups to an early grave, and drive the rest crazy. The legislation’s vague so policy can seem overly harsh to one person, and weak to another. Since 2005, compliance with European air quality targets for PM has been mandatory. European countries have been obliged to use monitoring stations to prove that they are meeting targets for PM with a diameter below 10µ, so-called PM10. Britain is off-target. According to commission staff, so are a number of other countries, including Netherlands, Italy and Germany. Member states must show that they do not fail two tests. Firstly, that a daily average of 50µg of PM10 per m3 does not occur more than 35 times in one year. Secondly that at all stations there is not an average level over a year greater than 40µg per m3. Perhaps the key confusion has been that there’s a lot of small stuff out there, which often isn’t so bad for you, and which in any case is a fairly natural part of our dusty life on Earth. Sea salt and Saharan sand are a case in point. Resuspended road grit and construction dust is another. In Netherlands, half of PM10 is reckoned to be from natural sources like sea salt. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have complained that some countries seem to be doing next to nothing. They cite Netherlands’ introduction of speed reductions on a mere five stretches of highway. Equally, the confusion has led to rather dramatic initiatives. The Italian region of Lombardy is engaged in a reportedly EUROS 500 million effort to retrofit the worst diesel vehicles with particulate matter traps in order to meet its targets. More recently, European member states have won the right to use GPS transponders to charge higher road-use fees to truckers if their vehicles are high PM emitters. But be all that as it may, the Commission feels that the response of European governments to an estimated 3.6 million life-years-lost per year from PM has been disappointing. So for some time, it’s has been considering how best to punish those countries who’ve been avoiding air quality measures, while giving more flexibility to active countries. Acknowledging the vagueness of the PM10 targets, it’s proposed in the Ambient Air directive to base new limits on PM2.5. These smaller diameter particles are typically the result of combustion. The proposal calls for a legally binding cap for average concentrations of PM2.5 of 25µg per year to be attained by 2010, but the WHO annual mean Air Quality Guideline for PM2.5 is 10µg. As a result, the Commission’s proposed targets have been criticised by NGOs like Transport and Environment. “The WHO guidelines clearly show that the Commission proposal with respect to air quality doesn’t go far enough to protect human health. The ambition level of the proposals should be strengthened, and the best science in the world now confirms this,” said T&E’s Jos Dings. The impacts on the process and refining industry could be far-reaching. For one thing, the drama of the PM health effects statistics has to some extent been deflected up to now by a shrug of the shoulders and the comment: ‘Well, most of it’s sea salt, anyway’. That was often true of PM10, but isn’t true of PM2.5. It’ll be easier for countries to target measures on transport and industrial sites. Once policy makers latch onto a parameter they consider barometric of the environmental good, like sulphur levels, they’ll tend to keep squeezing it downwards. If you’re one of the many process plants with a deadline right in front of you to renew your operating permit under the Integrated Pollution Prevention Control Directive, then yes, I think these proposed changes will in time affect you too. Finally, although there’s a review of Directive (98/70) fuel specs going on as I write, I haven’t detected any appetite at the Commission, or even among NGOs, to cut diesel aromatics. Only the Germans and some refiners with aromatics units are arguing that cutting diesel aromatic residues would help reduce the reverse hockey stick curve that shows PM emissions from transport plateauing in recent years. But on diesel, experience tells me anything can happen when authorities start closing cities to polluting diesel vehicles, as has been happening in Italy and could happen in Germany. It was the threat of a diesel bus ban in my local city of Gothenburg that led Swedish refiners to finally get behind the implementation of Swedish Class 1 diesel, that is, the national grade of diesel with the lowest sulphur and aromatics in Europe. | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
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