Abstract
Widespread economic growth in China has led to increasing episodes of severe air pollution, especially in major urban areas. Thermal power plants represent a particularly important class of emissions. Here we present an evaluation of the predicted effectiveness of a series of recently proposed thermal power plant emission controls in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region on air quality over Beijing using the Community Multiscale Air Quality(CMAQ) atmospheric chemical transport model to predict CO, SO2, NO2, PM2.5, and PM10 levels. A baseline simulation of the hypothetical removal of all thermal power plants in the BTH region is predicted to lead to 38%, 23%, 23%, 24%, and 24% reductions in current annual mean levels of CO, SO2, NO2, PM2.5, and PM10 in Beijing, respectively. Similar percentage reductions are predicted in the major cities in the BTH region. Simulations of the air quality impact of six proposed thermal power plant emission reduction strategies over the BTH region provide an estimate of the potential improvement in air quality in the Beijing metropolitan area, as a function of the time of year.
Highlights
Among the 500 largest cities of China, it is estimated that fewer than 1% can meet World Health Organization air quality guidelines (10 μg m−3 for annual mean and 25 μg m−3 for 24-hour mean for fine particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter
Thermal power plants are a major source of atmospheric emissions in China, controls on which are crucial for the improvement of air quality
In comparison with current emission control policies, the newly-designed control policies considered here are predicted to lead to reductions in January levels in Beijing between −8.6% and −14.8% for PM2.5, PM10, NO2, and SO2 and between −23.0% and −27.7% for CO
Summary
Resulting from targeted SO2 and NOx emission controls for 2010; it was predicted that annual PM2.5 and SO2 could decline by [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] μg m−3 (4–25%) and 30–60%, respectively. Wang et al.[16] predicted that for areas with PM2.5concentrations exceeding the second-level air quality standard (25 μg m−3 for annual mean and 50 μg m−3 for 24-hour mean) in 31 selected provinces in China, the annual mean SO2 and NOx concentrations in 2020 relative to 2010 could be reduced by 40.0% and 31.6%, respectively, and the annual mean PM2.5 concentration could decrease by 17.2%. We present results of the application of the CMAQ air quality model (see Methods) to evaluate the effects of thermal power generation emission controls in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region (Fig. 1)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
