CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE MAIN METHODOLOGIES FOR ESTIMATING ATMOSPHERIC EMISSIONS FROM VESSELS

Resumo

Coastal communities neighboring port terminals are impacted by the air pollutants emitted by vessels during their activities. One of the sustainable management tools adopted by these cities is the inventories preparation of local pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHG) to quantify these atmospheric emissions. There are a variety of bottom-up methodologies developed to estimate air emissions from ships. Given this fact, the objective of this study was to evaluate the methodologies proposed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and the European Environmental Agency (EEA), to highlight the assumptions, limitations, and uncertainties associated with the application of each one. Only the US EPA and CARB methodologies proposed estimation for GHG (CO₂). In addition, the analysis showed that although the methodologies adopt the same approach (bottom-up methodology), the results can be quite different due to the input data that each one requested. This fact highlights the need for the development of experimental studies to obtain emission factors appropriate to the circulating vessels fleet, to reduce uncertainties in the estimates, since reliable emission inventories are a subsidy for the elaboration of environmental management policies and the creation of atmospheric emission control programs in port regions.