Dissertation
AIR QUALITY MODELING TO ASSESS IMPACTS OF PRESCRIBED FIRES AND A BIOFUEL SUPPLY CHAIN IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2016
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111692
Abstract
Biofuels are a cleaner alternative to conventional fossil fuels, which have long been criticized for their role in global warming. First generation biofuels, which rely on energy rich crops, have been criticized for causing greenhouse gas emissions and also for the ‘food versus fuel’ debate. Second generation biofuels present an alternative which don’t cause any competition with agricultural land and food crops. Second generation biofuel feedstocks are crop residue and woody biomass such as forest residue. However, there is large knowledge gap and no assessment has been made on air quality impacts of such a woody biomass based biofuel industry. The overall objective for the research presented in this dissertation is to conduct air quality impact analyses related to the potential establishment of biofuel supply chains for aviation fuel using woody residues from logging operations in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). This work was undertaken as part of the environmental impact analysis within the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) research program.
Assessment of the air quality impact from prescribed fires in the PNW is presented which are shown to cause serious air quality impacts through elevated PM2.5 concentrations, specifically for small, rural communities. This increase in particulate concentration can be associated with several hundred additional deaths across the domain, and an even higher increase for other health endpoints. The results also show that prescribed fires can cause degradation in visibility in protected wilderness areas. These results are extended in an analysis of the air quality impact from the complete supply chain in the PNW as envisioned through the NARA project. Results from a regional photochemical air quality modeling framework called AIRPACT show that most of the summer time impacts are from the biorefinery emissions where the maximum ozone increase is found to be 1-2 ppb. In terms of overall health impacts, the small negative effects from biorefinery emissions can be completely offset by the avoided smoke emissions when slash piles are not burned, but are converted to biofuel. Results are also presented from an evaluation of the AIRPACT system for the PNW region which show that the model has good skill in predicting high ozone concentrations, but has relatively poor performance in forecasting PM2.5 accurately. However, the poor PM2.5 performance during summer has little implication on NARA results since the model performance is better during fall-winter months when we see most benefits from the NARA project.
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Details
- Title
- AIR QUALITY MODELING TO ASSESS IMPACTS OF PRESCRIBED FIRES AND A BIOFUEL SUPPLY CHAIN IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
- Creators
- Vikram Ravi
- Contributors
- Brian K. Lamb (Advisor)Michael P. Wolcott (Committee Member)Joseph K. Vaughan (Committee Member)Serena H. Chung (Committee Member)Indroneil Ganguly (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 181
- Identifiers
- 99900581432101842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation