Assessment of HAPs emissions from advanced power systems

The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) identified 189 substances as air toxics or hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). Under the CAAA, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must regulate emissions of these HAPs at their sources, including advanced power systems used for the production of electricity. Eleven trace elements are included in the CAAA list of HAPS, as shown in Table 1. The EPA will define those sources that require regulation and limit their emissions according to regulatory directives. This project focused on evaluating and manipulating the advanced power systems HAPs data currently available for presentation to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Trace components included in the 189 HAPs of the 1990 CAAA are: antimony compounds; arsenic compounds; beryllium compounds; cadmium compounds; chromium compounds; cobalt compounds; lead compounds; manganese compounds; mercury compounds; nickel compounds; and selenium compounds. The review of trace element emissions from advanced power systems and hot-gas cleanup systems included data from Tidd Station, General Electric hot-gas cleanup, Louisiana Gasification Technology Incorporated, and the Cool Water plant. Very few other sources of information were located, and those that were contained significantly flawed information that was not of value to this project. To offset the shortage of information, thermochemical equilibrium predictions were used in evaluating advanced control systems. An outline of the systems reviewed is given in Table 2. In addition to the four demonstration and 1 full-scale systems reviewed, nine conventional systems were also reviewed for comparison with the advanced systems.