Take pollution from an expanded aluminum smelter and bottle it up in one of the world’s most constrained airsheds.
Now add emissions from two or three liquefied natural gas plants burning massive amounts of natural gas and hundreds of LNG tankers moving up and down Douglas Channel each year transporting diesel fuel.
Add another 220 oil tankers to take oil from the Northern Gateway pipeline down Douglas Channel.
Now add an oil refinery.
Can the Kitimat airshed handle all that pollution without exceeding federal and provincial industrial pollution limits?
To answer that question, airshed modelling and an assessment of the cumulative emissions of all the proposed industries need to be done, says an air pollution expert at University of British Columbia.
“If people are planning to do all of that, they have to do an integrated assessment of the capacity of that airshed to assimilate that much pollution,” said Douw Steyn, a professor at UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.
“Has the Ministry of Environment done the local airshed monitoring?” asked Tyler Bryant, a David Suzuki Foundation energy policy analyst.
“If they haven’t done that, why not?”
Some airshed modelling was done as part of a review of Rio Tinto Alcan’s $2.7 billion plans to expand its smelter in Kitimat, according to the BC Ministry of Environment.
But the ministry admits that no comprehensive assessment of emissions from all the industries proposed for Kitimat has been done. The assessments are done project by project.
“We haven’t done that level of detail in anticipation of the LNG facilities, because normally we would work on the proponent to do that,” said Glen Okrainetz, manager of clean air section for the Environmental Protection Division.
But Steyn said that’s an approach that resulted in Trail becoming a pollution law case study.
Bryant suspects the airshed is too confined to handle all the pollution that would occur, should all the proposed projects proceed.
Cross-examination of Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) officials during the Northern Gateway pipeline Joint Review Panel process also offers a hint of the scale of the problem. The panel established that the cumulative impacts on Kitimat’s airshed of the Northern Gateway pipeline, LNG industry and smelter expansion are unknown. It was also established that the oil tanker traffic alone from the Northern Gateway project – about 220 tankers per year – could result in pollution that exceeds the permissible limits, according to provincial and federal air quality standards, if the ships burned bunker fuel. As Enbridge pointed out, the ships would be required to switch to diesel fuel when entering Canada’s 200-mile boundary. But it underscores how a single industrial project could affect Kitimat’s air quality.
Pollution that NOx your SOx off
Particulate matter, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur oxides (SOx) from fossil fuels can have negative effects on human health, and federal law limits their allowable emissions. It’s not just the volume of pollution that’s an issue – the geography and meteorology of a region are just as important. Some airsheds can vent pollution better than others.
“Kitimat is among the most constrained airsheds on the planet,” Steyn said.
Even before David Black proposed a $16 billion oil refinery near Kitimat, the Gitga’at First Nation were raising concerns about an LNG industry’s impacts on air quality in Kitimat. “For us it’s the air quality,” Gitga’at band councillor Marvin Robinson told Business in Vancouver.
The B.C. government plans to allow LNG producers to burn natural gas as part of the liquefaction process; Black’s refinery would also use large volumes of natural gas.
Natural gas is one of the cleanest burning fuels, so there might not be a concern with some of the more harmful pollutants.
But it could produce large volumes of NOx, which combines with organic volatile compounds (VOCs) – from forests, for example – to create ozone, which can cause respiratory problems. Steyn added that flaring from oil refineries typically produces SOx.
Oil refineries burn natural gas and the bottom-of-the-barrel products like petroleum coke, which produce a range of pollutants.
Black said his proposed refinery would use Expander Energy Inc.’s Fischer-Tropsch process, which would eliminate the baser products, like petroleum coke, and reduce CO2 emissions by 40% to 60%. While that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would not address other pollutants, like NOx and SOx and particulate matter.
“There are tough restrictions on NOx and all the other emissions and, of course, we will be meeting all the emission requirements,” Black said two weeks ago at a BC Chamber of Commerce breakfast.
Paul Kariya, executive director for Clean Energy BC, said Black’s refinery proposal could result in an interesting quandary for the government: if one industry goes ahead, will it mean another can’t, due to pollution constraints within a narrow, confined airshed?
“As a private-sector association, one has to wonder: how would you allocate airshed space?” Kariya asked. “Does oil take precedence over [power] generation or LNG?”
But that’s not the way the province works. Said Okrainetz, “We don’t draw a line in the sand and say this airshed is full.”
