Providing Resilience. GPSA Midstream Suppliers Past President. Booth MBA. UW Engine Research Center Alum.
Having a lower emission product is great, but customer awareness is key! Back when the Canadian wildfire smoke was blowing down to my home near Milwaukee, I posted about air quality and how #naturalgas engines (especially our VHP S4 and S5 stoich engines) produce very low PM2.5 emissions. You might imagine how I felt when I recently had a #gascompression customer tell me that they permitted a competitor engine for a project because it had lower PM2.5 levels and they were bumping against site limits. The issue is that many OEMs (including Waukesha Gas Engines) do not publish PM2.5 emissions as part of their performance runs, so customers typically use EPA AP-42 factors. As published, the EPA shows about half the PM2.5 emissions for lean burns vs. rich (stoich) burns, but they also give these factors an 'E' accuracy rating, the worst possible. However, in the case of our VHP product line, we do have data available in our emissions specification sheet (S-8483-06), which is available on our information portal (check comments) and shows that our numbers are 64x lower than what is published in AP-42 for 4SRBs and 33x lower than 4SLBs. These values are low enough to that PM2.5 emissions should not be an issue for the vast majority of our customers. My question for my environmental permitting folks: how often do you run into PM2.5-related issues? Is it to avoid 1 hr NO2 modeling? To avoid jumping into a more difficult permit? I'd love to hear from you...