EPA eGRID 2010 CO2, SO2 and NOx Emissions Data for U.S. Electric Power Plants

The fol­low­ing data is from the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agen­cy’s 2010 eGRID data­base, which has data for all elec­tric gen­er­at­ing plants in the U.S.  Our copy of this data, orga­nized to pro­duce the charts below, is avail­able here.

[Note that, while this data makes nat­ur­al gas look clean, it’s only look­ing at smoke­stack emis­sions.  Nat­ur­al gas has green­house gas emis­sions worse than coal due to methane leak­age from extrac­tion to use, and land­fills are also much worse than appears here because much of their emis­sions are from unfil­tered tox­ic land­fill gas escap­ing cap­ture and leak­ing direct­ly into the air.]

The pur­ple col­or on the CO2 chart is the “bio­genic” frac­tion of CO2, which is real CO2 emit­ted into the atmos­phere, though agen­cies still count it as zero even though sci­ence and the courts have both con­clud­ed that this CO2 is not car­bon neu­tral in any mean­ing­ful time frame, and ought to be counted.

Bro­ken out in more detail by what is burned…

KEY:
The broad cat­e­gories list­ed in *ALL CAPS* are com­bined as such (# of facil­i­ties are in parenthesis):

• BIOMASS includes Agri­cul­tur­al bio­mass (2), Black liquor (1), Oth­er bio­mass solids (1), Poul­try lit­ter (1), and Wood / Wood Waste (49).
• COAL includes Bitu­mi­nous coal (194), Lig­nite coal (17), Sub­bitu­mi­nous coal (158), and Waste coal (14).
• INCINERATION includes Trash incin­er­a­tors (50) and Refuse-derived fuel (RDF) facil­i­ties (9).
• OIL includes Distillate/diesel oil (319), Jet fuel (31), Kerosene (13), Petro­le­um coke (7), Resid­ual oil (16), Refin­ery gas (5), Waste oil (4).
• OTHER FOSSIL includes Blast Fur­nace Gas (1), Oth­er (oil) liq­uid (1), Oth­er fos­sil gas (1), Oth­er fos­sil solids (1), and Tire-derived Fuel (2).

The num­bers of facil­i­ties in the oth­er cat­e­gories are:

Digester gas (7)
Land­fill gas (257)
Nat­ur­al gas (861)

METHODOLOGY:

We arrived at these num­bers by eval­u­at­ing 2,022 elec­tric gen­er­at­ing facil­i­ties in the U.S. from the plant-lev­el data in the eGRID v.9 data­base.  The PLNT10 table in the data­base has 5,587 facil­i­ties, many of which had to be exclud­ed to do this com­par­i­son.  Exclu­sions are as follows:

• Facil­i­ties that don’t burn any­thing: we ruled out 2,196 facil­i­ties because they are pri­mar­i­ly facil­i­ties that use nuclear pow­er, geot­her­mal, wind, solar or hydro­elec­tric, or use pur­chased heat/steam.  We relied on the PLPRMFL and PLPFGNCT fields for this.
• Facil­i­ties burn­ing mul­ti­ple fuels: We ruled out anoth­er 497 facil­i­ties because they burn more than 5% of a dif­fer­ent fuel.  We did this so we could do an hon­est com­par­i­son of emis­sions from a fuel type.  For this, we relied on these fields: PLCLPR, PLOLPR, PLGSPR, PLNCPR, PLHYPR, PLBMPR, PLWIPR, PLSOPR, PLGTPR, PLOFPR, PLOPPR.  Note that trash incin­er­a­tors (MSB) are clas­si­fied as burn­ing a com­bi­na­tion of fos­sil and non-fos­sil resources, but most are still burn­ing pri­mar­i­ly trash (or processed trash, known as refuse-derived fuel), so we cod­ed these as MSW and left them in.  The only excep­tion to this 5% exclu­sion rule is for the Exeter Ener­gy LP facil­i­ty that burns tires in Ster­ling, CT and co-fires 8.8% oil and gas (main­ly gas).  This was includ­ed in order to get more accu­rate data on tire-derived fuel burn­ers, since there is only one oth­er (small­er) facil­i­ty burn­ing just tires.  The effect of includ­ing Exeter actu­al­ly dras­ti­cal­ly low­ered the aver­age emis­sions for tire-derived fuel burners.
• Facil­i­ties using com­bined heat and pow­er: We exclud­ed anoth­er 482 facil­i­ties that gen­er­ate steam heat in addi­tion to elec­tric­i­ty if their pow­er-to-heat ratio was < 10.0.  In oth­er words, we exclud­ed those that aren’t pri­mar­i­ly mak­ing elec­tric­i­ty.  This was done to ensure that we can make com­par­isons in terms of pol­lu­tion per amount of elec­tric­i­ty pro­duced with­out over­es­ti­mat­ing pol­lu­tion lev­els by fail­ing to account for sig­nif­i­cant amounts of ener­gy pro­duced in the form of steam heat instead of elec­tric­i­ty.  We relied on the USETHRMO and PWRTOHT fields, where PWRTOHT <10.0.
• Facil­i­ties not gen­er­at­ing any elec­tric­i­ty in 2010: Anoth­er 390 facil­i­ties were exclud­ed because they gen­er­at­ed no elec­tric­i­ty in 2010.  For this, we relied on the CAPFAC field, where it was was neg­a­tive or zero (most of these also show that PLNGENAN is neg­a­tive or zero and many also show 0% of any resource mix).  These are near­ly all oil or gas burners.

A copy of the Excel file where these eGRID num­bers are crunched, can be found here.  The exclu­sions above are cat­a­logued in colums D through G, and the exclud­ed data is still avail­able below row 2,029.  Fields used in the analy­sis are marked in row 3 as “new” (fields we added), “group­ing” (fields used to cat­e­go­rize the facil­i­ties), “Excl” (fields used to exclude facil­i­ties as described above), and “data” (fields used in the data analysis).