(465b) Options for Compliance Mercury Monitoring At Coal-Fired Power and Cement Producing Plants

Options for Compliance Mercury Monitoring at Coal-Fired Power and Cement Producing Plants

Timothy Rodak, Volker Schmid, James E. Wright

Clean Air Engineering, Pittsburgh, USA.

ABSTRACT

Mercury emissions from coal-fired power and cement producing plants have been recently regulated by the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) and National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP). These rules are anticipated to significantly reduce mercury emissions and consequently lower the concentration of mercury in the flue gas effluent from these facilities.

This presentation overviews and discusses compliance options for mercury monitoring available to plant operators. One of these options is the installation and use of sorbent trap-based mercury monitors (STMM), which have the ability to accurately and reliably measure a wide range of mercury concentrations including the very low levels mandated by MATS.

The disadvantage of sorbent trap-based mercury monitoring is the lack of temporal resolution in the data as would be required for process control. However, STMM systems can be coupled with a continuous emission monitoring system (CEMS) if feedback for process control is needed. The CEMS could be configured just for process intelligence without the constraints when accumulating data for compliance demonstration. Experience using a CEMS for process control concurrently with STMM will be presented.