Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1024
12 Jun 2023
 | 12 Jun 2023

Detecting nitrogen oxide emissions in Qatar and quantifying emission factors of gas-fired power plants - A four-years study

Anthony Rey-Pommier, Frédéric Chevallier, Philippe Ciais, Jonilda Kushta, Theodoros Christoudias, I. Safak Bayram, and Jean Sciare

Abstract. Nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2), produced in urban areas and industrial facilities (particularly in fossil fuel-fired power plants), are major sources of air pollutants, with implications for human health, leading local and national authorities to estimate their emissions using inventories. In Qatar, these inventories are not systematically updated, while the country is experiencing fast economic growth. Here, we use spaceborne retrievals of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns at high spatial resolution from the TROPOMI instrument to estimate NOx emissions in Qatar from 2019 to 2022 with a flux-divergence scheme, according to which emissions are calculated as the sum of a transport term and a sink term representing the three-body reaction comprising NO2 and hydroxyl radical (OH). Our results highlight emissions from gas power plants in the north-east of the country, and from the urban area of the capital Doha. The emissions from cement plants in the west and different industrial facilities in the south-east are under-estimated, due to frequent low-quality measurements of NO2 columns in these areas. Our top-down model estimates a weekly cycle with lower emissions on Fridays compared to the rest of the week, which is consistent with social norms in the country, and an annual cycle with mean emissions of 9.56 kt per month for the four-year period. These monthly emissions differ from CAMS-GLOB-ANT_v5.3 and EDGARv6.1 global inventories, for which the annual cycle is less marked and the average emissions are respectively 1.44 and 1.68 times higher. Our emission estimates are correlated with local electricity generation, and allow to infer a mean NOx emission factor of 0.557 tNOx.GWh−1 for the three gas power plants in the Ras Laffan area.

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Journal article(s) based on this preprint

30 Oct 2023
Detecting nitrogen oxide emissions in Qatar and quantifying emission factors of gas-fired power plants – a 4-year study
Anthony Rey-Pommier, Frédéric Chevallier, Philippe Ciais, Jonilda Kushta, Theodoros Christoudias, I. Safak Bayram, and Jean Sciare
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 23, 13565–13583, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-13565-2023,https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-13565-2023, 2023
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The requested preprint has a corresponding peer-reviewed final revised paper. You are encouraged to refer to the final revised version.

Short summary
We use four years (2019–2022) of TROPOMI NO2 data to map NOx emissions in Qatar. We estimate...
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