Development of 2015 Vietnam emission inventory for power generation units

Abstract

The 2010 and 2015 Emission Inventories (EIs) for Vietnam Thermal Power Plants (TPP) were concurrently developed using the bottom-up approach. Local activity data, emission factors, and pollution control efficiencies were applied to estimate the annual emissions of individual power plants. As the EIs consider all emission control activities with relevant unit upgrades, the estimated SO2, NOx and PM species were found to be lower than most of the reported EIs by 20–70%. An overestimation (i.e., 3.8 times) of SO2 has been observed in Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) EI, which can possibly be attributed to the assumption of no air pollution controls in their inventory. Overall, the newly developed EIs indicate that the annual emissions of coal-fired TPPs were highest among the various types of TPPs, and the largest uncertainty occurred in NOx with ranges between −23% and +31%. In terms of regional distribution, the most significant emission sources of CO2, N2O, SO2, NOx, PM10, PM2.5, BC, and OC were from the Red River Delta region resulted from coal-fired TPPs, while the Southeast region had the largest sources of CO, NMVOC, and CH4 caused by gas-fired TPPs. The study reveals that from 2010 to 2015, the growths of NOx, CO, NMVOC, PM10, PM2.5, BC, OC, CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions were 51%, 39%, 41%, 109%, 88%, 9%, 107%, 58%, 33%, and 119%, respectively, while ~19% reduction in SO2 was found resulted from the decommission of oil-fired TPPs.