Air Emission Assessments
Clearstone offers a broad selection of services to sample, measure, estimate and simulate emissions from process, fugitive, and natural emission sources. We perform root-cause analyses to determine the key sources of off-site air quality problems, compare emissions to available benchmarks and performance standards, and delineate the different practicable control solutions available.
Our experience includes the development of emission factors and methodology manuals for government and industry, delineation of odours, determination of baseline emissions, emission forecasting and backcasting, and emission reporting.
Our key air emission assessment services are laid out below.
Emission Estimates and Inventories
Clearstone has all the tools necessary to develop accurate emission inventories:
Expertise in facilities design, process operations and air pollution control systems.
Working knowledge of environmental regulations.
Specialized source-testing capabilities.
Emission-source simulation software.
Extensive emission databases.
We have developed facility, corporate, regional and national emission inventories for greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting compounds, acid forming emissions, and air toxics.
This has included the evaluation of emissions for sources as diverse as:
Agricultural soils, exposed oilsands deposits, contaminated surfaces and landfills.
Rail, air, on-road and off-road traffic.
Storage tanks, tanker loading and unloading operations, API separators, tailings ponds, process sewers, and sewage lagoons.
Well testing and servicing operations.
Urban centers and military installations.
Stationary combustion sources.
Vents, flares, process buildings, fugitive equipment leaks, accidental releases and spills.
Measurement and Characterization Studies
Clearstone provides specialized measurement programs to assess trace air toxics and odorous emissions from a variety of industrial facilities and sources (e.g., reduced sulphur compounds [RSCs] and BTEX emissions from petroleum facilities; fugitive emissions of VOCs and RSCs at oil sands mining, extraction and upgrading facilities; aerosol emissions from heavy oil production tanks, and fugitive dioxin and furan emissions from an integrated hazardous waste treatment, handling and disposal facility).
The specific measurement techniques we offer include the following:
Measurements to quantify volatilisation rates from both liquid and solid surfaces.
Odour and aerosol sampling.
Tracer techniques.
Remote monitoring methods.
Conventional stack sampling.
Leak and vent measurements and screening techniques.
Compliance Auditing and Reporting
Clearstone offers emission auditing and reporting services, and has been actively involved in the development of many of the related national and international standards for the oil and gas industry.
This has included:
A federal and provincial emission audit manual for use by operators of oil and gas facilities.
Emission assessment guides and handbooks for the petroleum and natural gas industries.
International standards for development and technical auditing of national GHG emission inventories.
National air monitoring protocols for the petroleum industry.
"Best management practices" for flaring of associated gas, management of fugitive emissions and the quantification of vented and flared volumes.
Emission Source Modeling
Clearstone maintains current emission-source modeling tools from US EPA, GTI and API in addition to an extensive array of software tools developed in house.
These applications are used to rigorously model:
Thermodynamic and transport properties of gases and liquids.
Pipeline blowdown and rupture events.
Instantaneous wind, temperature and displacement induced ventilation rates of storage tanks.
Transient fluid flow using computational fluid dynamics.
Exfiltration losses from buildings.