Roger Brown

Oakwood Environmental

Biography:

Dr Roger Brown FRSC is the Managing Director of Oakwood Environmental Services, an emissions and environmental consultancy. Dr Brown has been actively involved in consultancy and all aspects of source emission and ambient air testing for over 35 years. As a director of several blue-chip companies, he developed their emission test services. He currently provides consultancy to some of the world’s largest companies and holds patents for the measurement of various novel species and processes. He has also designed and commissioned state-of-the-art mobile laboratories for regulatory purposes and process optimisation. He has authored numerous papers and chapters in key works on the measurement of pollutants. He graduated from Southampton University with a doctorate in chemistry and conducted postdoctoral research into mass spectrometry and dioxin analysis. He is currently a director of the Source Testing Association and was a past Chairman, having been involved in the association for 28 years.

Short description about presentation:

Increasingly the amount of biogenic versus fossil fuel is becoming important from a fiscal viewpoint. An overview of an eminently elegant and relatively simple method to determine the proportion of material arising from biogenic sources will be reviewed by determining the ratio of 14C to 12C in CO2. This is determined by obtaining a sample over a number of days and the resulting ratio of average 14CO2 to 12CO2 determined using AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry). The talk will briefly cover:

Procedures for collection of whole gas samples and absorption of CO2 in liquid and solid alkaline media are given. The biogenic fraction is determined using the measured 14C value. From the calculated biogenic CO2 fraction, the emitted amount of biogenic and fossil CO2 can be calculated. The author was a member of the ISO Committee which produced BS ISO 13833:2013 which describes the above method.