Emissions from households and other small combustion sources and their reduction potential

To explore the potential contribution of Eco-design product standards to the achievement of the targets of the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution, this report develops different scenarios for implementations of more stringent emission limit values to small combustion sources. In 2005, small sources of solid fuel combustion contributed about one third to total EU-27 emissions of fine particles (PM2.5) and black carbon (BC), and less than 10% to total non.methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). For PM2.5, it is estimated that an implementation of Eco-design standards would lead to significant reductions of emissions from small sources compared to the baseline projection. If the discussed Eco-design standards were only introduced for air pollution emissions (without requirements for improved energy efficiencies), PM2.5 from these sources would decline by 38% in 2020 relative to 2005 level (compared to a 21% cut in the current legislation case). By 2030, the Eco-design standards would reduce PM2.5 emission by 70% relative to 2005 (the current legislation only by 40%), and in 2050 these standards would lead to 83% lower emissions, while the baseline results in only 50% relative to 2005. These calculations assume no premature scrapping of existing equipment. These emission reductions would account for a sizeable fraction of the total PM2.5 emissions from all sectors in the EU-27. In 2020, introduction of the Eco-design standards would cut total PM2.5 by 7%, in 2030 by 16%, and in 2050 by almost 20%. Black carbon emissions from small combustion sources, which have recently received increasing attention because of their negative health and climate effects, would be reduced by the Eco-design standards by 25% in 2020 and by 75% in 2050. Although small combustion sources make only limited contributions to NMVOC emissions (8% in 2005), Eco-design standards could reduce these emissions in 2020 by 50% relative to 2005 (compared to a 25% cut envisaged for the baseline), by 80% instead of 50% in 2030, and by more than 90% compared to 60% in 2050. Even larger emission reductions can be achieved if Eco-design standards would also affect energy efficiency standards, as highlighted by a scenario with ambitious assumptions on energy efficiency improvements for small sources. However, this scenario assumes rapid turnover of existing (inefficient) devices including premature scrapping before the end of its regular lifetime. In reality, such a scenario would be difficult to realize in the short run, since it would require a very fast replacement of the existing capital stock by new equipment and unlimited availability of pellets

Development of a road transport emission inventory for Greece and the greater Athens area: Effects of important parameters

Traffic is considered one of the major polluting sectors and as a consequence a significant cause for the measured exceedances of ambient air quality limit values mainly in urban areas. The Greater Athens Area (located in Attica), the most populated area in Greece, faces severe air pollution problems due to the combination of high road traffic emissions, complex topography and local meteorological conditions. Even though several efforts were made to construct traffic emission inventories for Greece and Attica, still there is not a spatially and temporally resolved one, based on data from relevant authorities and organisations. The present work aims to estimate road emissions in Greece and Attica based on the top down approach. The programme COPERT 4 was used to calculate the annual total emissions from the road transport sector for the period 2006–2010 and an emission inventory for Greece and Attica was developed with high spatial (6 × 6 km2 for Greece and 2 × 2 km2 for Attica) and temporal (1-hour) resolutions. The results revealed that about 40% of national CO2, CO, VOC and NMVOC values and 30% of NOx and particles are emitted in Attica. The fuel consumption and the subsequent reduction of annual mileage driven in combination with the import of new engine anti-pollution technologies affected CO2, CO, VOC and NMVOC emissions. The major part of CO (56.53%) and CO2 (66.15%) emissions was due to passenger cars (2010), while heavy duty vehicles (HDVs) were connected with NOx, PM2.5 and PM10emissions with 51.27%, 43.97% and 38.13% respectively (2010). The fleet composition, the penetration of diesel fuelled cars, the increase of urban average speed and the fleet renewal are among the most effective parameters towards the emission reduction strategies

Market-based instruments to reduce air emissions from household heating appliances: Analysis of scrappage policy scenarios

This document explores the potential for the use of a market based instrument to contribute to reducing the emissions of particulate matter of less than 10 micrometres from household heating appliances in the framework of the review of the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution. The study is focused on the assessment of the economic and environmental impacts of possible scrappage policies for promoting the accelerated replacement of existing heating appliances by cleaner ones. Under these policy programmes, households replacing an old appliance by a cleaner one would receive a subsidy from the government. This subsidy would compensate households for the residual value of the appliance scrapped and the opportunity costs of the early investment in a new one. Two different scenarios are analysed: The scrappage and replacement of all the different types of conventional appliances that do not incorporate any emission control technology ("non-controlled"), and the scrappage and replacement of only "non-controlled" firewood and hard coal fired manual single house boilers. It is assumed that the scrappage programme is in force between 2018 and 2020. For each scenario, the study focuses on the effects of different levels of replacement of the "non-controlled" appliances and the size of subsidies relative to the investment costs.JRC.J.5-Sustainable Production and Consumptio

HTAP_v2.2: a mosaic of regional and global emission grid maps for 2008 and 2010 to study hemispheric transport of air pollution

The mandate of the Task Force Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF HTAP) under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) is to improve the scientific understanding of the intercontinental air pollution transport, to quantify impacts on human health, vegetation and climate, to identify emission mitigation options across the regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and to guide future policies on these aspects. The harmonization and improvement of regional emission inventories is imperative to obtain consolidated estimates on the formation of global-scale air pollution. An emissions data set has been constructed using regional emission grid maps (annual and monthly) for SO2, NOx, CO, NMVOC, NH3, PM10, PM2.5, BC and OC for the years 2008 and 2010, with the purpose of providing consistent information to global and regional scale modelling efforts. This compilation of different regional gridded inventories - including that of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for USA, the EPA and Environment Canada (for Canada), the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) and Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) for Europe, and the Model Inter-comparison Study for Asia (MICS-Asia III) for China, India and other Asian countries - was gap-filled with the emission grid maps of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv4.3) for the rest of the world (mainly South America, Africa, Russia and Oceania). Emissions from seven main categories of human activities (power, industry, residential, agriculture, ground transport, aviation and shipping) were estimated and spatially distributed on a common grid of 0.1 degree W 0.1 degree longitude-latitude, to yield monthly, global, sector-specific grid maps for each substance and year. The HTAP_v2.2 air pollutant grid maps are considered to combine latest available regional information within a complete global data set. The disaggregation by sectors, high spatial and temporal resolution and detailed information on the data sources and references used will provide the user the required transparency. Because HTAP_v2.2 contains primarily official and/or widely used regional emission grid maps, it can be recommended as a global baseline emission inventory, which is regionally accepted as a reference and from which different scenarios assessing emission reduction policies at a global scale could start. An analysis of country-specific implied emission factors shows a large difference between industrialised countries and developing countries for acidifying gaseous air pollutant emissions (SO2 and NOx) from the energy and industry sectors. This is not observed for the particulate matter emissions (PM10, PM2.5), which show large differences between countries in the residential sector instead. The per capita emissions of all world countries, classified from low to high income, reveal an increase in level and in variation for gaseous acidifying pollutants, but not for aerosols. For aerosols, an opposite trend is apparent with higher per capita emissions of particulate matter for low income countries

Proceedings of Abstracts 12th International Conference on Air Quality Science and Application

© 2020 The Author(s). This an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Final Published versio

Evaluation of the performance of four chemical transport models in predicting the aerosol chemical composition in Europe in 2005

© Author(s) 2016.Four regional chemistry transport models were applied to simulate the concentration and composition of particulate matter (PM) in Europe for 2005 with horizontal resolution 20 km. The modelled concentrations were compared with the measurements of PM chemical composition by the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) monitoring network. All models systematically underestimated PM10 and PM2:5 by 10–60 %, depending on the model and the season of the year, when the calculated dry PM mass was compared with the measurements. The average water content at laboratory conditions was estimated between 5 and 20% for PM2:5 and between 10 and 25% for PM10. For majority of the PM chemical components, the relative underestimation was smaller than it was for total PM, exceptions being the carbonaceous particles and mineral dust. Some species, such as sea salt and NO3, were overpredicted by the models. There were notable differences between the models’ predictions of the seasonal variations of PM, mainly attributable to different treatments or omission of some source categories and aerosol processes. Benzo(a)pyrene concentrations were overestimated by all the models over the whole year. The study stresses the importance of improving the models’ skill in simulating mineral dust and carbonaceous compounds, necessity for high-quality emissions from wildland fires, as well as the need for an explicit consideration of aerosol water content in model–measurement comparison.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Assessment of the sensitivity of model responses to urban emission changes in support of emission reduction strategies

© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The sensitivity of air quality model responses to modifications in input data (e.g. emissions, meteorology and boundary conditions) or model configurations is recognized as an important issue for air quality modelling applications in support of air quality plans. In the framework of FAIRMODE (Forum of Air Quality Modelling in Europe, https://fairmode.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) a dedicated air quality modelling exercise has been designed to address this issue. The main goal was to evaluate the magnitude and variability of air quality model responses when studying emission scenarios/projections by assessing the changes of model output in response to emission changes. This work is based on several air quality models that are used to support model users and developers, and, consequently, policy makers. We present the FAIRMODE exercise and the participating models, and provide an analysis of the variability of O3 and PM concentrations due to emission reduction scenarios. The key novel feature, in comparison with other exercises, is that emission reduction strategies in the present work are applied and evaluated at urban scale over a large number of cities using new indicators such as the absolute potential, the relative potential and the absolute potency. The results show that there is a larger variability of concentration changes between models, when the emission reduction scenarios are applied, than for their respective baseline absolute concentrations. For ozone, the variability between models of absolute baseline concentrations is below 10%, while the variability of concentration changes (when emissions are similarly perturbed) exceeds, in some instances 100% or higher during episodes. Combined emission reductions are usually more efficient than the sum of single precursor emission reductions both for O3 and PM. In particular for ozone, model responses, in terms of linearity and additivity, show a clear impact of non-linear chemistry processes. This analysis gives an insight into the impact of model’ sensitivity to emission reductions that may be considered when designing air quality plans and paves the way of more in-depth analysis to disentangle the role of emissions from model formulation for present and future air quality assessments.Peer reviewe