Abstract Title: | Lowering Particulate Matter Emissions Through Improved Information |
Session Choice: | Monitoring Techniques: Particulate |
Presenter Name: | Mr Udit Gupta |
Co-authors: | Prof Michael Greenstone Prof Rohini Pande Dr Nicholas Ryan Dr Anant Sudarshan |
Company/Organisation: | J-PAL South Asia at IFMR |
Country: | India |
Abstract Information :
The advent of Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS) (Central Pollution Control
Board, 2013) represents a tremendous breakthrough in industrial pollution regulation. It has
significantly increased the frequency of interaction of regulators with industries, as well as
the level of sophistication of data handled by regulators, in addition to improving
transparency of information exchange, incentivizing pollution abatement and reducing
compliance costs.
We are directly testing the benefits of dramatically improving information quality through the
use of CEMS for Particulate Matter (PM) emissions from industrial plants. This pilot is
implemented in over 350 solid fuel burning plants in Surat, where rollout of low-cost AC/DC
triboelectric CEMS devices is complete, and will produce evidence on the impact of sending
high frequency emissions data to regulators and regulated industry. It will also create the
monitoring framework necessary to implement markets. The rollout of CEMS also contains
an embedded randomized control experiment framework enabling clean measurement of the
benefits of high quality information. Data has already been gathered from these plants with a
focus on boiler efficiency, and we intend to measure any changes in efficiency driven by
continuous monitoring through this experiment.
The use of CEMS allows State Pollution Control Boards to measure the total mass of
particulates emitted into the ambient, a quantity that is of direct health importance and
proportional to fuel use, but is not measured in the status quo where plant emissions are
measured only in terms of concentration of pollutants over a short period of time. Thus plants
under CEMS reporting have a greater incentive to conserve kilogrammes of fuel burned
relative to the status quo. We expect to see lower overall PM emissions for industries in the
treatment group (with PM CEMS instruments) than those in the control group (without PM
CEMS devices).