A General Model for Estimating Air Emissions in Petroleum Refineries Using Emission Factors Technique

Estimating the quantities of certain substances discharged into the atmosphere by several industrial activities is a necessary and fundamental stage in any environmental protection policy to tackle today's problems such as acid rain, the degradation of air quality, global warming and climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer. Any environmental protection policy requires comprehensive information on the pollution profiles of particular activities. In most countries and for petroleum refineries, particularly, such comprehensive information base does not exist. This paper proposed a general model for filling part of the information gap with respect to air emissions estimation from petroleum refineries. It presents a pollution-estimation model that draws from published sources of information and allows analysts to obtain order-of-magnitude estimates of the air pollution generated by refineries. As an illustration, the model is applied to a case study.