A Novel Method for Determination of Acid Gas Flares Emission Factors

Acid gas flares have been identified as potential sources of H2S and SO2emissions. Directmeasurement of pollutants concentration for these flares has high risk because of high H2S orSO2emissions and flare height. In This work, a novel back–calculation based method was developed for estimation of SO2, CO and NO2emission factors for an acid gas flare in a selected gas sweetening plant. The results showed that this method can estimate more real emission factors compared to the common fuel analysis method. The results indicated that for selected acid gas flare SO2and NO2emission are lower than the published emission factors. The mean emission factors were estimated as 0.179, 0.0010 and 2.40 lb/ MMBtu (lb. per Million Btu) (0.0769, 0.000429 and 1.03 kg/109J) for CO, NO2and SO2, respectively. The uncertainty analysis showed that duo to high dispersion modeling uncertainty; the total uncertainty can be higher than 58% for all emission factors. The method can be easily applied for estimation of emission factors of other elevated sources such as typical gas flares and elevated stacks

Keywords:

Air pollution , Emission factor , Acid gas flare , SO2 , NO2