Abstract
Power generation plants are considered as one of the main sources for the emission of sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ) in the state of Kuwait. However, the use of fossil fuels having different sulphur contents for power generation has resulted in a significant variation on the environmental impact of SO 2 emission in Kuwait. The percentage of sulphur in the fuel used in each power station is 4%, 2.5%, 1%, or 0.5%. This paper presents an application of the industrial source complex model for short-term prediction (ISCST3) to quantify the impact of SO 2 released from four power plants in Kuwait. One-year hourly records of meteorological data together with the emission data for the year 2001 were used in order to predict the impact of SO 2 in the study area. Four different scenarios were simulated along with their corresponding real case scenarios to analyse the impact of SO 2 based on the sulphur content in the fuel used by the power plants. All of the predicted concentrations of SO 2 in the study area were compared with ambient air quality standard (KAAQS) for SO 2 in Kuwait. The comparison with the real case scenarios show that the predicted maximum hourly average ground level concentration is about 2244.19 μg/m 3 , exceeding the allowable KAAQS (hourly standard is 445 μg/m 3 ), whereas if the fuel used in all power plants is of 0.5% sulphur content the standard was not exceeded and the maximum hourly predicted concentration was 370.62 μg/m 3 . An important conclusion of this work is that there is a need for a fuel usage strategy for the power plants in Kuwait to minimise the impact of SO 2 .
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