Goal
Air quality and climate change can be impacted by same anthropogenic activities, creating opportunity to simultaneously reduce emissions of multiple air pollutants including NOX, SO2, VOCs, and greenhouse gas - CO2. While abatement technologies have different costs, reducing these emissions will also reduce ambient concentrations of ozone and fine particulate pollutants, which could yield health benefits. This project aims to characterize multi-pollutant emission reduction scenarios, and conduct cost-benefit analysis to provide information on “win-win” air pollution control, climate mitigation, and health outcomes.
Objectives
With support from Earthjustice, the Holloway Group quantifies multi-pollutant emission reductions, associated abatement costs, and health outcomes within the electricity sector. We establish multi-pollutant reduction scenarios based on peer-reviewed literature. We use several EPA’s emission datasets to calculate potential multi-pollutant emission changes. We will then apply the Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) to convert emission changes to concentration changes, and quantify the health benefits incorporating metrics derived from epidemiological studies.
Outcomes
We have summarized multi-pollutant emission reduction strategies. We have evaluated emission reductions achieved in each scenario. We anticipate providing more recent outcomes as our research progresses and new findings will be written up for publication in peer-review journals.
Funding Partner:
Earthjustice, NIH
Timeline:
2022 – Present
Tools:
- U.S. EPA’s National Emissions Inventory (NEI)
- Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data Explorer
- Clean Air Markets Program Database (CAMPD)
- Control Strategy Tool (CoST),
- Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ)
Core Team Members:
Tracey Holloway, Paul Meier, Xinran Wu