Animal Feeding Operations Services
From Measurement of Air Emissions from Complex Area Sources
On January 31, 2005, the USEPA provided the opportunity for companies engaged in animal feeding operations (AFOs) to sign a voluntary consent agreement which, in exchange for “safe harbor” provisions with respect to enforcement proceedings resulting from potentially injurious air emissions, would enable participants to “pool their resources to lower the cost of measuring emissions and ensure that they comply with all applicable environmental regulations in the shortest amount of time.” The Agreement requires each participating company, among other things, to “be responsible for the payment of funds towards a 2-year national air emissions monitoring study that will lead to the development of emissions-estimating methodologies which will help animal feeding operations determine and comply with their regulatory responsibilities under the Clean Air Act, CERCLA, and EPCRA.”
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Several AFO emission-source types exist, but the m...
Several AFO emission-source types exist, but the most challenging is the area source, which includes wastewater lagoons and open manure piles.
Two optical remote sensing (ORS) approaches for assessing AFO area sources are identified in the Agreement: “Eulerian Gaussian” and “Lagrangian Stochastic.” An advantage shared by all ORS methods is the generation of a path-integrated concentration. To the extent that this optical path can cover the entire contaminant plume from an area, only two additional pieces of information are needed to develop a flux estimate: the plume configuration in the vertical, and an estimate of a representative wind speed. When an ORS-measurable tracer is used, however, the need to measure these two parameters is reduced to the much simpler task of estimating the extent to which the tracer release matches the pollutant emissions.
Minnich and Scotto has demonstrated that the area-source technique (click on Water Pollution Control Plants) is a preferred alternative to the Eulerian Gaussian and Lagrangian Stochastic approaches for characterizing emissions from AFO area sources. In contrast to these latter approaches, this mass-balance alternative does not require consideration of contaminant or meteorological (wind) data in the vertical dimension. The resultant emissions information is inherently more accurate and is generated in a fraction of the time.
Even though the approaches specified in the Agreement are limited to the two identified above, the USEPA is interested in Minnich and Scotto’s area-source technique for estimating AFO emissions. A USEPA-sponsored field evaluation of several ORS-based approaches, including the area-source technique (modified for site-specific treatment of vertical dispersion), is scheduled for Spring 2007.
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