A New Approach for Estimating Fugitive Emission Rates during Chemical Process Design

Fugitive emissions are one of the most significant contributors to atmospheric releases in chemical process industries. Unlike stack emissions, fugitive emissions cannot be captured by the currently existing technologies as fugitive emissions are not point-source type of releases and they are not confined to a specific discharge point. Even though the amount of fugitive emissions is very small and almost invisible to eyes, continuous exposure to chemical substances due to fugitive emissions may adversely affect environment as well as workers’ health. Therefore efforts should be taken to reduce fugitive emissions from process industry like actively done for stack emissions; however the source and amount of the fugitive emissions should be first assessed beforehand. The assessment of such non point-based emissions is complicated especially during the early stage of chemical process design. This paper presents a novel approach for estimating fugitive emission rates of process modules in chemical process design. A framework is proposed to assist process engineers to assess fugitive emissions in a chemical process at the preliminary or basic design stages. It is worth mentioning that the estimation of emission rate of the process modules that are not available in the precalculated database is covered in the proposed approach. To illustrate the proposed approach, a case study is solved. Additional breathing loss and working loss present in the storage tank are taken into consideration in calculating total fugitive emissions. Based on the estimated fugitive emissions, assessments of health risk of the chemical process are conducted.