Tracking Biomass Air Pollution on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula

Track­ing Bio­mass Air Pol­lu­tion on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula

Gov­ern­ment agen­cies and pol­i­cy­mak­ers have long turned a deaf ear to con­cerns with human health threats from bio­mass incin­er­a­tion. A new exper­i­men­tal study under­way on Washington’s Olympic Penin­su­la may ulti­mate­ly com­pel elect­ed offi­cials to act to pro­tect pub­lic health from bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, while serv­ing as a mod­el for com­mu­ni­ties around the nation.

The Olympic Region Clean Air Agency (ORCAA) bud­get­ed over half a mil­lion dol­lars to con­duct this new exper­i­men­tal study “focus­ing on the impacts of bio­mass fueled cogen­er­a­tion facil­i­ties on air qual­i­ty down­wind,” with addi­tion­al mon­i­tor­ing of the air qual­i­ty near two pro­posed bio­mass incin­er­a­tors, a 20-megawatt facil­i­ty at Nip­pon Indus­tries in Port Ange­les and a 24-megawatt facil­i­ty at Port Townsend Paper Com­pa­ny in Port Townsend.

The new study would more intense­ly mea­sure how air qual­i­ty will change once the bio­mass incin­er­a­tors come online, assess any increase in Par­tic­u­late Mat­ter, includ­ing PM 2.5 and small­er, ultra­fine par­ti­cles, deter­mine which neigh­bor­hoods would be most affect­ed, and estab­lish whether par­ti­cle lev­els and size dis­tri­b­u­tions change seasonally.

“Small­er par­ti­cles pen­e­trate deep­er into lungs, heart, and even brain to cause more health dam­age,” explained the Pro­pos­al for Ultra­fine Par­ti­cle study in Jef­fer­son and Clal­lam Coun­ties.

The first ever Con­gres­sion­al brief­ing on the health impacts of bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, includ­ing threats from Par­tic­u­late Mat­ter, was held in Sep­tem­ber 2012, orga­nized by Save America’s Forests and the Anti-Bio­mass Incin­er­a­tion Cam­paign.

One com­po­nent of the new study focus­es on Ultra­fine Par­tic­u­late Mat­ter lev­els before and after the con­struc­tion of the bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ties, which would be built adja­cent to exist­ing paper mills at Nip­pon Indus­tries in Port Ange­les and Port Townsend Paper Com­pa­ny. The incin­er­a­tors would burn trees, tree tops, tree limbs and also like­ly con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion debris.

Bob Sex­tro, for­mer air qual­i­ty engi­neer and Sequim res­i­dent, explained that per­ma­nent air mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions have exist­ed for years, one each in both Port Ange­les and Port Townsend, to mea­sure PM 2.5. There are now also two new­er mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions in Port Ange­les and one in Sequim (about 15 miles east of the Nip­pon facil­i­ty), along with a new­er instru­ment at the same site as the per­ma­nent monitor.

These new­er instru­ments are opti­cal par­ti­cle coun­ters (OPC), which will oper­ate between Jan­u­ary 2013 and Decem­ber 2013, and then will be relo­cat­ed to Port Townsend in 2014. In both Port Ange­les and Port Townsend, one of the OPCs will be col­lo­cat­ed at the per­ma­nent air mon­i­tor­ing sta­tion, which uses a neph­elome­ter to mea­sure par­tic­u­late mat­ter. ORCAA will also use an aethalome­ter to mea­sure the lev­els of black car­bon to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between pol­lu­tion from wood com­bus­tion and diesel exhaust.

In the newest exper­i­men­tal study, ORCAA pro­pos­es to col­lab­o­rate with atmos­pher­ic sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton (UW) to “exam­ine the con­cen­tra­tion, sources and life­times of ultra­fine par­tic­u­late” in Port Ange­les and Port Townsend. One new ultra­fine mon­i­tor, called a scan­ning mobil­i­ty par­ti­cle siz­er, will be placed near res­i­den­tial areas of Port Townsend and the Port Townsend Paper Com­pa­ny, while the sec­ond ultra­fine mon­i­tor will be in Port Ange­les in prox­im­i­ty to the Nip­pon Paper facility.

Accord­ing to the study pro­pos­al, “con­tin­u­ous stack emis­sion mea­sure­ments” at the incin­er­a­tors will be tak­en in addi­tion to “ambi­ent mea­sure­ments to deter­mine their poten­tial influ­ence on the ambi­ent air qual­i­ty.” Mea­sure­ments of PM 2.5, “num­ber con­cen­tra­tion and size dis­tri­b­u­tion of ultra­fine par­ti­cles (diam­e­ter < 100 nanome­ters)” along with car­bon monox­ide lev­els will also be tak­en at the Port Ange­les and Port Townsend locations.

One poten­tial com­pli­ca­tion is the fact that the Nip­pon bio­mass incin­er­a­tor may come online in fall 2013, too soon to gath­er base­line win­ter mea­sure­ments of ultra­fines. If the incinerator’s start­up is not delayed into 2014, “mete­o­rol­o­gy and plume dis­per­sion mod­el­ing will allow data to be seg­re­gat­ed” to times when emis­sions from Nip­pon could impact measurements.

Accord­ing to the study pro­pos­al, the area to be mon­i­tored has some of the clean­est air in the coun­try and there are “no oth­er large indus­tri­al sources or major free­ways to obscure ultra­fine and fine par­tic­u­late emis­sions” from the bio­mass incin­er­a­tors. How­ev­er wood-burn­ing stoves “con­sti­tute a large frac­tion of the observed PM 2.5” dur­ing the winter.

Sex­tro believes the study could oper­ate as a “start­ing point” for a nation­al mod­el of mon­i­tor­ing air pol­lu­tion from bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, as well as guid­ing future local stud­ies. “Assum­ing the study is sol­id,” Sex­tro said, it will pro­vide some “pow­er­ful data.”

How­ev­er, since the project only involves col­lect­ing data, Sex­tro said the next step would be a “health impacts analy­sis” to deter­mine whether the lev­els of ultra­fine par­ti­cles mea­sured may pose a threat to com­mu­ni­ty members.

“A miss­ing piece,” added Sex­tro, is “more gaseous emis­sion data at the mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions”, espe­cial­ly for “tox­ic VOCs [Volatile Organ­ic Com­pounds] that have known health effects.”

The new bio­mass incin­er­a­tors will be fit­ted with emis­sion con­trol tech­nol­o­gy that is intend­ed to low­er the amount of PM 2.5 cur­rent­ly emit­ted by the paper plants (while burn­ing a greater vol­ume of bio­mass). How­ev­er, car­cino­genic Volatile Organ­ic Com­pounds and Nitro­gen Oxides will “rough­ly increase by 35 and 18 tons per year,” for the Nip­pon facil­i­ty in Port Ange­les, accord­ing to the study proposal.

While PM 2.5 lev­els may decrease, the study pro­pos­al explained that “the num­ber of ultra­fine par­ti­cles, which may be more haz­ardous to res­pi­ra­to­ry and car­dio health, will increase.”

Accord­ing to an inde­pen­dent study con­duct­ed in Col­orado in 1997, when PM 2.5 lev­els decrease, sul­fur diox­ide and nitro­gen oxides “have less sur­face area on which to con­dense” and are more like­ly to “homo­ge­neous­ly nucle­ate ultra­fine par­ti­cles down­wind of the emis­sion site.” This means that as emis­sion con­trols lim­it the amount of PM 2.5, small­er, dead­lier ultra­fine par­ti­cles are more like­ly to be formed. 

A health con­sul­ta­tion study con­duct­ed by the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices in response to air pol­lu­tion con­cerns with the Port Townsend Paper Com­pa­ny in 2008, stat­ed that “the asso­ci­a­tion between air pol­lu­tion and human ill­ness has been well estab­lished. Peo­ple who are most sen­si­tive to air pol­lu­tion are those with heart and lung dis­ease (includ­ing asth­ma), stroke, dia­betes, infants and chil­dren, and old­er adults, (those 65 and old­er), or peo­ple with a cur­rent res­pi­ra­to­ry infection.”

How­ev­er, the report found that exist­ing mon­i­tor­ing was not suf­fi­cient to trace health impacts from the paper mill, since the exist­ing mon­i­tor “does not con­sis­tent­ly cap­ture emis­sions” from the facil­i­ty. There­fore, the report “can­not con­clude whether air emis­sions from PTP mill could harm people’s health because the infor­ma­tion we need to make a firm con­clu­sion is not available.”

Bio­mass oppo­nents are hope­ful that the cur­rent mon­i­tor­ing effort will give cit­i­zens a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the pol­lu­tion lev­els of bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, which will allow for a greater under­stand­ing of cur­rent and poten­tial health impacts, which may ulti­mate­ly influ­ence ener­gy pol­i­cy on a local, region­al, and nation­al scale.