Air quality modelling of sulphur dioxide emission from power plants in Kuwait

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 .