Environmental Protection Specialist U.S. Environmental Protection Agency RTP, NC
WebFIRE is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) online emissions factor repository, retrieval, and development tool that has been widely used by federal agencies; state, local, and tribal (SLT) agencies; consultants; and industries in estimating emissions. The Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) project seeks to streamline multiple emissions reporting processes for point sources. This presentation provides an analysis of issues prevalent in WebFIRE use that are impacting CAER System (CAERS), SLT, and industry reporters. The resolutions of these issues will help streamline air emissions reporting further. Current WebFIRE (downloaded on 09/22/2020) contains 25,379 emission factors (including revoked) for 2,726 point source SCCs. Those emission factors are in different types. Although the majority of emission factors are in discrete values, some emission factors are in a “less than” format, a range, or a formula. Those emission factors are also expressed in different throughput materials, unit of measures, actions, and combinations of materials, measures and actions per source classification code (SCC). SCCs are the code used to describe emission processes. Besides challenges mentioned above, there are data issues in WebFIRE emission factors such as missing values and incomplete notes. The analysis is conducted for those identified issues by a collaboration of SLT and EPA members in a subproject under CAER. The project also makes recommendations on how CAERS could deal with these issues. Those recommendations are useful for SLT emission inventory systems.
