Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The combustion of fossil fuels increases greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and causes reduced air quality (AQ). Due to their high visibility, fossil fuelled power plants are particularly associated with this problem. There is increasing public pressure for governments to eliminate these power plants as a means to minimise GHG emissions and improve AQ, but this must be done in a way that maintains an adequate and inexpensive energy supply. Exploring solutions to these divergent requirements is usually done with the help of models, which allow many possible approaches to be tested and the best one selected without incurring the (usually large) expense of implementation. In a market economy, it is the responsibility of the industrial sector to find methods to satisfy government regulations in ways that are not only successful but also cost effective. The role of the academic researcher in this effort is to provide novel and effective methods that can be used by the private sector partners to attain these goals. This project will develop, in partnership with the private sector partner, Ontario Power Generation, a method to predict the effects of the emissions from fossil fuelled thermal generating plants on the AQ at three geographical scales: the local vicinity of the plant; the regional, with emphasis on large population centres and the long range, which includes national or international effects. The first phase of the project will focus on the OPG coal fired thermal generating plants, which have been the subject of a great deal of public discussion and media attention for many years. The models to be developed for this project will also be applicable to any fossil fuelled power plant, however, and in the second phase of the project, we will use them to study the effects on AQ in Canada of fossil plants in the United States. This broader view will be useful to put the Canadian situation in context and to provide the Federal government as well as the broader modelling community with information that will be useful in discussions regarding abatement of the AQ problems from facilities on both sides of the border.