Abstract
Selected Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) emitted from various anthropogenic sources including industries and motor vehicles act as primary precursors of ozone, while some VOC are classified as air toxic compounds. Significantly large VOC emission sources impact the air quality in Corpus Christi, Texas. This urban area is located in a semi-arid region of South Texas and is home to several large petrochemical refineries and industrial facilities along a busy ship-channel. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has setup two continuous ambient monitoring stations (CAMS 633 and 634) along the ship channel to monitor VOC concentrations in the urban atmosphere. The hourly concentrations of 46 VOC compounds were acquired from TCEQ for a comprehensive source apportionment study. The primary objective of this study was to identify and quantify the sources affecting the ambient air quality within this urban airshed. Principal Component Analysis/Absolute Principal Component Scores (PCA/APCS) was applied to the dataset. PCA identified five possible sources accounting for 69% of the total variance affecting the VOC levels measured at CAMS 633 and six possible sources affecting CAMS 634 accounting for 75% of the total variance. APCS identified natural gas emissions to be the major source contributor at CAMS 633 and it accounted for 70% of the measured VOC concentrations. The other major sources identified at CAMS 633 included flare emissions (12%), fugitive gasoline emissions (9%), refinery operations (7%), and vehicle exhaust (2%). At CAMS 634, natural gas sources were identified as the major source category contributing to 31% of the observed VOC. The other sources affecting this site included: refinery operations (24%), flare emissions (22%), secondary industrial processes (12%), fugitive gasoline emissions (8%) and vehicle exhaust (3%).
Highlights
Volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted from anthropogenic and natural sources are of great interest from the standpoint of urban air quality
The hourly concentrations of various VOC compounds measured by the auto-GCs for the study period of March 2005 through December 2006 were acquired from Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for this source apportionment analysis
Source apportionment analysis was conducted using hourly VOC concentrations measured at Continuous Ambient Monitoring Stations (CAMS) 633 and 634 during March 2005 through December 2006
Summary
Volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted from anthropogenic and natural sources are of great interest from the standpoint of urban air quality. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recognized some of the volatile organic compounds (VOC) compounds as air toxics or carcinogens [1, 2]. There are many sources of VOC in an urban environment. Numerous studies have been conducted in the United States, Europe and Asia for the source apportionment of VOC in the ambient air. Source receptor models such as Chemical Mass Balance (CMB), Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF), UNMIX, Principal Component Analysis/Absolute Principal Component Scores (PCA/APCS) have been used in these studies
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