Air Toxics and Mercury Monitoring Webinar February 5 - MACT is Coming

This webinar had six interesting presentations:

John A. Cooper, President of Cooper Environmental Services, LLC, described a common platform for continuously measuring toxic metals in stack gas emissions and ambient air. A range of metals including Cr, As, Hg, Pb, and Cd can be accurately measured at a cost less than a mercury analyzer by itself.

Phil Downey, Environmental Specialist with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Division of Air Pollution Control, Air Monitoring Section, presented an overview of the Ohio EPA’s air toxics sampling program. The program includes heavy metals, VOCs and SVOCs

Robert Spellicy, President of Industrial Monitor and Control Corp., discussed the use of FTIR instruments to continuously monitor SO₃ and H₂SO₄ as well as other pollutants. There is an ongoing program with EPRI to use FTIR to measure a range of pollutants including NH₃. Other than N₂ and O₂ most gases can be measured.

Jon Howard of Weston Solutions described his experience with measuring mercury and HAPs in the field. A number of continuous mercury monitoring systems (CMMS) have been tested. The following problems have been encountered.

• Problems in manufacturer parts within the CMMS probe,
• Failed integrity checks due to converter media,
• Robbing Peter to pay Paul due to difficulty getting parts,
• Contaminated sample lines at initial install due to oil build-up on new Teflon,
• Glass coated parts (never work on them when warm),
• Calibrator problems/No NIST traceable reference calibrators available,
• Scaled back budgets for O&M due to vacatur of CAMR rule,
• Changes are not seen instantly – requires patience while working on CMMS,
• Dirty Analyzers.

Jeremy Whorton, P.E., Mercury CEMs Application Engineer at ThermoFisher Scientific, talked about the state of mercury monitoring. One of the problems is the lack of a NIST traceability protocol. To fill the void Thermo Scientific will calibrate and adjust Model 81i to a NIST traceable 81i Vendor Prime gas generator, which has been linked to the Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer at the NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, MD. The 81i Hg Elemental gas generator will be inspected and tested for proper operation prior to Vendor Prime comparison. Thermo Scientific will perform a 3 x 3 x 1 matrix comparison of the customer supplied “User Prime” to the Vendor Prime calibrator located at the Thermo facility in Franklin, MA. In the future, Thermo plans to offer this service to be performed onsite by its team of field service engineers.

Paul Chu of EPRI covered EPRI air toxics work. Ongoing work includes updating emission factors for various HAPs. These were previously estimated in 1994 and again in 1999.

Bios, Photos and Abstracts can be accessed at

Bios, Photos, Abstracts - Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009

The individual power points are in the Mercury and FGD Decision Trees and can be viewed as follows:

John Cooper – Cooper Environmental

Mercury Continuing Decision Process For: Products

Xact CEMS presented by John Cooper, Cooper Environmental. Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.

http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/Mercury_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/John Cooper - Cooper Environmental.pdf
 

Jeremy Whorton

Mercury Continuing Decision Process For: Products

Update on Mercury Monitoring and the Thermo Scientific Mercury Freedom System presented by Jeremy Whorton, ThermoFisher. Mercury Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.

http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/Mercury_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/Jeremy Whorton - ThermoFisher.pdf
 

Jon Howard – Weston Solutions

Mercury Continuing Decision Process For: CEMS

 Experience Certifying CMMS using EPA RM 30B Procedures, presented by Jon Howard, Weston Solutions. Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.

http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/Mercury_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/Jon Howard - Weston Solutions.pdf
 

Phil Downey – Ohio EPA

Paul Chu - EPRI

FGD Continuing Decision Process For: Gases

Air Toxic Overview, presented by Phil Downey, Ohio EPA. Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/FGD_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/Phil Downey - Ohio EPA.pdf

HAPs Power Plant Measurements, presented by Paul Chu, EPRI. Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/FGD_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/Paul Chu - EPRI.pdf 

Robert Spellicy – Industrial Monitor & Control Corp.

FGD Continuing Decision Process For: Products

Current Applications of FTIR in Industrial Monitoring, presented by Robert Spellicy, Industrial Monitor and Control Corp. Hot Topic Hour February 5, 2009.

http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/FGD_Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/Robert Spellicy - Industrial Monitor & Control Corp.pdf