Abstract
Recent regulatory and legislative developments in the state of California (e.g., Assembly Bill (AB) 1647 and AB 617) will increase the extent of air quality monitoring in communities near petroleum refineries and at facility fencelines. This work reports results over a three-year period for currently-installed community and fenceline air quality monitoring for the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, USA. This paper presents the most comprehensive air quality dataset that has been published to date for a community near a petroleum refinery, including concentration of different air toxics (e.g., benzene, toluene, xylenes, etc.) and criteria air pollutants (e.g., ozone (O3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and particulate matter (PM)). Instrumental techniques such as ultra-violet differential absorption spectroscopy (UV-DOAS), laser-based spectroscopy and real-time gas chromatography (GC) were used in the community and fenceline monitors. From 2015 to 2017, measured concentrations at community monitors near the Richmond refinery were generally below California thresholds for acute and chronic health (only two exceedances were observed for 8-h average benzene concentrations during the three-year monitoring period). Although more detailed speciation for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) would be needed to confirm certain source profile identities, preliminary application of source apportionment methods indicates the prevalence of typical urban emission profiles, such as from traffic, in the measured community data.
Highlights
Long-term continuous monitoring of air quality in locations near industrial facilities, including petroleum refineries, is generally scarce, and few studies on long-term pollutant concentrations have been published in the peer-reviewed literature to date [1,2]. multiple monitoring studies have been conducted near petroleum refineries, these studies were usually limited in temporal coverage, spanning periods from hours to a few months, with some exceptions including seasonal sampling over longer periods of time [3,4,5,6,7,8]
Previous work on air quality at refinery perimeters primarily focused on monitoring multiple volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with more limited emphasis on measurements of particulate matter (PM), trace gases, metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) [2,3,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Passive VOC sampling followed by off-line gas chromatography separation using mass spectrometry or flame ionization detectors (GC-MS/GC-FID) has been the predominant analytical method employed in previous monitoring campaigns [13,14,15,16], while higher time resolution
Summary
Long-term continuous monitoring of air quality in locations near industrial facilities, including petroleum refineries, is generally scarce, and few studies on long-term pollutant concentrations have been published in the peer-reviewed literature to date [1,2]. Multiple monitoring studies have been conducted near petroleum refineries, these studies were usually limited in temporal coverage, spanning periods from hours to a few months, with some exceptions including seasonal sampling over longer periods of time [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Previous work on air quality at refinery perimeters primarily focused on monitoring multiple volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with more limited emphasis on measurements of particulate matter (PM), trace gases, metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) [2,3,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Receptor models including principal component analysis (PCA) and positive matrix factorization (PMF) have been employed in multiple studies to determine the contribution of distinct emission sources to the VOC levels observed in industrial areas, including from petroleum refining operations [13,22,23,24,25,26]
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