The assessment of the potential health and environmental impacts of amines and degradation products related to post-combustion carbon capture activities is a field undergoing continued advancement. Several detailed emissions evaluation campaigns have already occurred and provided substantial learnings as to the chemical compounds which will likely be most important from an impacts perspective, and to begin testing the performance of sampling and analytical methods that are useful for this purpose. However, several challenges must be addressed in order to make continued rapid progress towards a consistent and precise range of emissions rates for all chemicals of interest, and thus higher confidence in the results of environmental and human health studies moving forward. The community workshops described here were designed to identify and prioritize the most important challenges to these goals, and to brainstorm on approaches to addressing them.
Many of the critical data gaps identified by the 2011 workshop that are currently hampering impacts evaluation were not directly related to the health outcomes, knowledge of extent or mode of toxicity, or exposure information. Instead they related to insufficient knowledge on chemical composition, emission rates, and chemical fate and transport. This emphasizes the importance of creating cross-disciplinary amine research efforts that can leverage the knowledge and needs of various research communities. The 2012 working group noted the challenges with executing measurements of the various chemicals of interest at pilot plant stacks, but also made it clear that substantial improvement could be made in the performance of emissions measurements if concerted, thoughtful, and community-coordinated efforts were undertaken in both the laboratory and the field.
EPRI plans for 2013 and beyond include development and execution of the methods testing program which will be designed with input from the working group and results from the upcoming report. The goal of the testing is to further inform on the most appropriate sampling and analytical methods for amines and amine degradation products. Appropriate methods could, for example, be any number of methods that pass certain performance criteria as determined through the testing. Additionally, EPRI is sponsoring sessions at upcoming scientific meetings to bring together researchers working on amine issues from the perspectives of both the CCS community and the atmospheric science community [4]. The goal is to foster cross-disciplinary interaction and jointly learn from the varying approaches most commonly used in both communities.