Assessment of emissions and impact of steel production processes (ASEMIS)

The aim of this project was to provide improved understanding of steelworks’ emissions and their impacts on the ambient air quality. Novel methods and strategies to characterise airborne particulate matter were developed and implemented. A combination of real-time and off-line techniques was investigated, developed and successfully applied in situ, in several cases for the first time on a steelworks, such as LIDAR, mobile measurements, and on-line morphology analysis. An inventory of particulate emissions originating from fugitive sources has been built using comprehensive data collected in the sampling trials carried out in this project, together with earlier RFCS projects. The inventory covers a wide range of parameters for particulate matter such as number, mass, size distribution, morphology, chemical composition, and temporal trends and can be used as a database for further studies within the steel industry. The ambient air quality in the surroundings of integrated steelworks has been assessed at both UK and Spanish steelworks sites. Using a combination of complementary approaches, dispersion maps of the pollutants were produced that showed that the environmental impact of steelmaking operations was localised in the close vicinity of the site. Dispersion modelling demonstrated that fugitive sources of PM10 (particles with an aerodynamic diameter less than 10 μm) were much more significant than primary sources with respect to emissions. Statistical tools were also applied to PM10 in ambient air and these identified the main contributors to be a mixture of steelworks’ and nonsteelworks’ related sources. The contributions of various sources and hence the priorities for improved abatement will differ from one steelworks to another. As the recommendations from the European Best Available Technologies Reference Document are applied, which mostly tackles primary sources, it will become more important to minimise diffuse and fugitive emissions though a range of cost-effective methods to improve local air quality, helping create a sustainable future for European steelmaking