Process Analysis for Emissions Assessment and Inventory

Description:
Methods have been developed to assess emissions from storage tanks, pipelines, and process streams. These measurements assist in determination of emissions inventories.

Broad Fields of Use:
It can often be difficult to assess emissions from facilities due to temporal variations in operation and diurnal changes in the ambient environment. There is a need for sensing systems that can provide an accurate measure of emissions from tanks, pipelines and other industrial systems that process materials that contain regulated components. The techniques that we have developed can be used to determine emissions in systems and process streams where conditions may fluctuate significantly over time. We have developed pollutant monitoring techniques and system perturbation methods that allow assessment of emissions from storage tanks, pipelines, and other potential emission sources.

Comparison with Current Technologies:
There were no workable approved sensors or methods to assess emissions from storage tanks before the researchers became involved with the problem. They developed simple, cost-effective techniques to assess emissions from storage tanks. The methods can potentially be applied to a number of facilities or process streams where there are regulatory limits on emissions of components of the processed material.

Description of Current Application:
The methods were developed to assess losses of hydrocarbons from heavy crude oil storage tanks in Southern California as part of the Heavy Oil Storage Tank (HOST) Working Group's program to determine if emission controls were needed on the tanks. The methods were approved by both regulatory agencies and the affected industries.

Figure 1. A sampling device developed by Berkeley Lab researchers to sample emissions from heavy oil storage tanks.

Figure 2a and 2b. A field demonstration in southern California of the sampling device for heavy oil storage tank emissions.

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