Source Apportionment Of High Reactive Volatile Organic Compounds In a Region With The Massive Hydrocarbon Processing Industries

Abstract

In the Persian Gulf region, conditions are highly favorable for ozone air pollution and the region is a hot spot of photochemical smog. The vast activities in processing oil and gas play a major role in it. It was found that the elevated concentrations of reactive hydrocarbons co-emitted with nitrogen oxides from Hydrocarbon Processing facilities lead to substantial ozone production. South Pars Zone (SPZ) in Iran encompasses the largest gas plants and petrochemical complexes in the world and elevated concentrations of ozone were recorded by air qulity monitoring stations in SPZ. The first step to dealing with ozone air pollution is to quantify Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) emission and identify main emission sources. In this research, a reactivity-based VOCs emission inventory established to provide necessary input data for AQSMs and determine which compounds deserve relatively more attention in control strategy. To do this, first, a fully- speciated VOCs emission inventory was prepared. Then, VOCs were weighted by Maximum Incremental Reactivity scale. Results show that alkenes have the biggest role in mass emission (41%) and ozone creation (78%). Propylene, ethylene, isobutylene and formaldehyde have the most important roles in ozone formation. In addition, the major sources of their emissions are the leakage of equipments in the olefin processes and polymer production plants. The contribution of VOCs in the emission inventory and reactivity-based emission inventory of SPZ is pretty different from inventory composition of typical urban areas and areas with gas production industries but it has similarities with areas with petrochemical industries.