Publication

Availability and Infrastructure of North American Electric Generating Utility Emission Inventories and Opportunities for Future Coordination

Description

In an age of international air quality agreements and annexes, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation has identified a need for a state-of-knowledge application of emission inventories for purposes of public outreach, emission trends reporting, fulfilling data requests, control strategy application studies, benefit analyses, and estimating air quality in large regional areas. However, without consistent emission data sets within the domain of study, results of these applications can be speculative, at best. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has been working closely with North American federal environmental agencies to try and gather the latest emissions data which can be used to secure these end results.

The objective of this report is to demonstrate the comparability of techniques and methodologies for data gathering and analysis, data management, and electronic data communications for promoting access to publicly available environmental information held by public authorities of each of the three participating countries. By understanding what types of emissions data are collected and in what manner and frequency they are processed, managed, and distributed, we hope to provide the first steps in the development phase of a North American coordinated emissions invemission inventory. We have not attempted to characterize or compare emission totals in this report as these have been presented in previous work completed for the Commission.

Additional Information