Subsidy Tracker new data released

One of the projects that I work on for the nonprofit group Good Jobs First is their Subsidy Tracker site, "the only national [U.S.] search engine capturing company-specific economic development incentive awards from the federal government, all 50 states and many localities." Here's the press release and the site itself.

You can search this site in all sorts of ways -- including finding all of the subsidies given to major parent companies -- but one of the basic kinds of searches is finding the subsidies to businesses in your home town. You can do this by going to the bottom of the search form, filling in a state, and then choosing a city from a list of cities that will be populated. Here's a search for Northampton, MA. You can see a subsidy for the Coca-Cola plant, a major industrial water user, and one to Kollmorgen (now L-3 KEO), a defense contractor, as well as some subsidies to development firms -- probably the three most controversial businesses where I live.

RTK NET is back up

RTK NET, the Right-To-Know Network is back up (sort of) at rtk.net or rtknet.org. By "sort of" I mean that it currently is up in the form of a page of backend links that I wrote in 2 minutes in vi. But those links do work and provide the previous RTK NET search capability, and the Houston Chronicle (which has taken over RTK NET) is working on putting a front end in place.

RTK NET provides public access to U.S. toxic release / chemical accident / hazardous waste data, including TRI (Toxic Release Inventory), NRC (National Response Center), BRS (RCRAINFO Biennial data), the rest of RCRAINFO (i.e. hazardous waste permits), and RMP (Risk Management Plan) data. Other than the RCRAINFO hazardous waste permits data, the databases are fairly up to date with last update dates as follows:

• TRI: 10/08/2015
• BRS: 10/27/2015
• NRC: 01/05/2016
• RMP: 12/30/2015
• RCRAINFO: 05/19/2013

RTK NET is the only online searchable source that I know of for NRC and RMP data (both chemical accident databases) and its interface to TRI and BRS has some advantages that other sites don't have. I've worked on the project since 1991 and I'm glad that it's going back up.

Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings released

The Political Economy Research Institute at Umass (PERI) has released the Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings of top corporate polluters for 2016, based on Toxic Release Inventory data as weighted by EPA's geographic micro data RSEI model and with facilities assigned to a regularized set of parent companies.

One of the things that becomes apparent in analyses of these kind of data -- whether it's a news story like this one on the super polluters that USA Today did with the Center for Public Integrity or an academic paper published by Mary Collins, Joseph JaJa, and Ian Muñoz -- is that pollution from fixed facilities is dominated by a small number of facilities. To reduce pollution overall you don't necessarily have to reduce it from every facility equally.

Here's an example from the Toxic 100 Air. DuPont, the company ranked second on the list, has 97% of its total U.S. score from a single facility, the DuPont Pontchartrain Works in La Place, LA -- emissions that affect a local population that is over 60% racial and ethnic minorities. So what's going on there?

DuPont vs Chemours facilities

On July 1, 2015 DuPont completed the spin-off of The Chemours Company. There have been many reports about how DuPont loaded Chemours up with a large proportion of both its environmental liabilities and its debt, raising the question of what would happen if Chemours went bankrupt. DuPont is also attempting to merge with Dow Chemical, and there are rumors that the merger, if approved, will be followed by a split of the merged companies into three pieces. If that does happen it will be anyone's guess about who if anyone will pay for past pollution, and how much expensive litigation it would take to even begin to answer that question.

The immediate question, and first step, is to track which DuPont components have become Chemours. Let's say that you have a database divided up into reporting by facility, as most environmental databases are. And let's also say that the data that you have show all facilities reporting as DuPont, because you are tracking past data or because the database you're using last reported before the split (as the 2014 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) did). Which U.S. DuPont facilities are now Chemours facilities?

Here's the best answer I could turn up to this question from public documents. The list of Chemours facilities is from a June 5, 2015 SEC filing. The number of facilities matches the number of production facilities in the U.S. from the Chemours Web site. Note (1) in the City column indicates a lease, (2) indicates a lease from Du Pont (which I've still treated as belonging to Chemours), and (3) indicates a shared facility between two branches of Chemours.

The facilities below are basically identified by city and state in most sources. But some of the facilities are actually in different cities than the city that they are referred to as being in, either in their mailing address or their facility name. The "2014 TRI" column shows which city the facility is actually in according to that database. If the city is the same as the first column (or if I didn't find it at all), I've marked it with an "x". Otherwise, it shows an alternate city that the facility may be listed under.

City	State	2014 TRI
El Dorado (1)	AR	x
Edge Moor	DE	x
Red Lion (1)	DE	Delaware City
Starke (Mine)	FL	x
Louisville	KY	x
Wurtland	KY	x
Burnside	LA	Darrow
Elkton (1)	MD	x
DeLisle	MS	Pass Christian
Pascagoula (3)	MS	x
Fayetteville	NC	x
Deepwater	NJ	x
Morses Mill (1)	NJ	Linden
Niagara	NY	x
Fort Hill	OH	North Bend
N. Kingstown (1)	RI	x
New Johnsonville	TN	x
Memphis	TN	x
Corpus Christi	TX	Gregory
LaPorte (2)	TX	x
Beaumont	TX	Nederland
Borderland (1)	TX	x
James River	VA	Richmond
Washington	WV	x
Belle (3)	WV	x

Environmental data reports

I mostly work on data-backed sites that present free information to the public. I've done it as a staffer for a nonprofit group from 1991-1997 and as a consultant to nonprofit groups since 1997. From 1998-2005 I also helped to analyze data for a number of white-paper reports from environmental groups -- after that, computer and data literacy became widespread enough so that this kind of work was generally done in-house. These reports are mostly of historical interest now, but some of them may still be useful. There's a page that lists them, but it's a bit much to look through so I've listed them by category here:

• PRTRs (pollutant release and transfer registries): 1991 (waste transfers), 1998 (underground injection), 1998 (water), 2000 (water), 2000 (child development), 2005 (regulatory), 2013 (water)
• chemical accidents: 1998, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007
• air toxics: 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004

In addition there were two reports that were pretty much sui generis and were in many ways my favorites: Poisoning Our Future (1998) and Cabinet Confidential (2004). The first of these looked at sources of persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs) by integrating many different documents and databases: something like I'd like some day to go back to and see what we were wrong and right about. The second was a rather inspired but rickety attempt to use a Massachusetts toxics use database, a New Jersey toxics use database, and the U.S. national PRTR to estimate quantities of toxic chemicals within products nationwide, something that none of these databases had been designed to do.

With this and the posts below (copied from my personal blog, when I had a brief enthusiasm for writing posts about this kind of thing in late 2008 / early 2009) I've summed up my previous writing about data. I'm working on a wider variety of projects now and hope to write about them here.

Greenhouse 100

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

The latest project that I've worked on, PERI's Greenhouse 100, is here. It's a publicly accessible EPA database of greenhouse gas polluting facilities, summed up by parent company. I think that it's the first list of its kind that includes both power plants and other industries.

2007 TRI released

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

The latest version of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) came out on the 19th, with RTK Net's version open a day later. This year, RTK NET's version also supplies RSEI risk screening numbers -- for the first time, an at least partial answer to the question "How important is this particular release of pollution, anyways?"

EPA continued its recent trend of downplaying the data release. I don't think that they announced they'd be releasing it far in advance -- I had to find out about it through the grapevine after it was already up. I didn't see much news about it, and the news there was was unspecific. For instance, the overall release trend was down, but PCB releases jumped 40%. Why? According to this story, for one example, "EPA said that the jump was probably due to disposal of old equipment or clean up at industrial sites." Probably? The vast majority of the increase seems to be due to one site, Chemical Waste Management in Emelle, Alabama. Why not call that facility and get the actual cause for the jump? That's one of the things that would change this from a contextless, uninvestigated number into a story that people could begin to understand.

So much for TRI's expanded Form A

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

As mentioned in an article here, the return of the Toxic Release Inventory's Form A to its older reporting levels -- back to 500 pounds instead of 2000 pounds of releases, if you don't want to get technical about it -- was attached to the spending bill and signed into law. It was pretty much a race between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches to see who would get this one first after Bush left.

If you do want to get technical about it, then this particular Post article, like almost all news articles that I know something about, is misleading. A sentence reads "The legislation restores the standard established by law in 1986, compelling all facilities to inform the public of any chemical releases that total 500 pounds a year or more, lowering the 2,000-pound threshold Bush had adopted." I could see not mentioning that it was actually two thresholds that were affected (one for releases and the other for waste generated). But the standard was never set by law, in 1986 or anytime else. The law leaves it up to EPA to set a reasonable standard. That's why the threshold can change in the first place. The older Form A level, which is what we're returning to, didn't even exist at all within the law as passed in 1986 -- it was added to TRI for 1995.

"Wait a minute -- literal or figurative volcano?"

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

That was how I answered the beginnings of the phone call. In this case, yes, it's literal: there's a volcano threatening to go off at Mount Redoubt in Alaska which could possibly once again (as it did a couple of decades ago) affect the Drift River Oil Terminal, a set of storage tanks that usually stores hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil. Chevron refuses to release information about how much oil they have left at the facility, citing Homeland Security concerns. There's a good article on it here.

How is this possibly homeland security information? Everyone already knows where the facility is, has pictures of it, and knows how much oil it generally holds. What Chevron doesn't want to release is information about how much oil it holds right now, now that they've pumped some of the oil out in response to the volcano building up nearby. Of course they have all sorts of economic motives to leave as much oil as possible there and risk it, and people concerned about the environment have opposite motives to push them to get the oil out of the river's floodplain. I don't understand how they even can claim a concern about terrorism without everyone laughing at them.

This is not the first time that terrorism has been claimed as a concern in order to avoid the release of chemical accident information. On the contrary, that started even before 9/11 -- even as industry managed to have its politicians avoid making any requirements that they actually do anything to reduce accident risk. I've worked with this kind of thing for a long time, which is why I got the call in the first place. This may be a good test of Obama's new FOIA policy. It really comes down to one of two alternatives. If the government knows what Chevron is doing to prepare for this volcano, then that information should be FOIA-able. And if it doesn't know, why not?

An agenda for the Toxic Release Inventory

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

Today Obama signed a new Executive Order revitalizing FOIA, and spoke about transparency being one of the touchstones of his Presidency. As a sort of minor reciprocal gesture of faith, I've decided to put up an agenda of changes that I think should be made to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), one of U.S. EPA's most successful data programs. At any time during the last eight years, I wouldn't have talked about these ideas in any public forum until each piece was ready to be proposed formally, knowing that talking about the agenda beforehand would only give industry a heads-up to prepare to scuttle it. But perhaps being willing to talk about it beforehand will help everything go more smoothly. Needless to say, I'm also eager to hear about other people's ideas.

I have no formal authority to propose these kinds of changes at all, and am not writing this under any organizational affiliation. They are simply my personal ideas. However, I've worked extensively on the Toxic Release Inventory outside EPA since 1990, and I consider myself to be an expert on it. There are a number of organizations which I plan to work with to propose these things formally, in the event that no one else does.

I'll try to provide a little bit of background, in the unlikely event that anyone reads this who doesn't know all about TRI already. If you want to find out basic information about the Toxic Release Inventory, you can go to EPA's Web page on it, but in short it's a database, legislatively mandated to be publicly accessible in electronic form, that requires most kinds of large, fixed polluters to report their releases and transfers of toxic chemicals, as well as the toxic chemicals in waste that they generate. Unlike EPA's hazardous waste databases, it also requires that these reports be of the amount of chemical, not the amount of chemical plus inert filler, and that the reports be in common units. Facilities have to report releases of chemicals to air, land, water, and underground. These characteristics make the database EPA's most useful one for general toxic pollution issues. TRI was the model for many similar databases in other countries; these databases are generally called PRTRs, Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers.

The Toxic Release Inventory has had notable expansions during its now decades-long span -- waste data was added by the Pollution Prevention Act in 1991, Federal facilities added in 1994, hundreds of chemicals added in 1995, new industries outside manufacturing had to report starting in 1998, and data on persistent bioaccumulative chemicals was expanded in 2000. And for the last eight years, that's where it has stood -- other than a disgraceful reduction in TRI data in 2006, when the "Form A" option for facilities to avoid reporting was expanded, despite widespread opposition from the public, lawmakers, and scientists. Suffice it to say that although EPA's civil service employees generally understand the value of TRI, the administration running the agency at that time was actively hostile.

So these ideas have been around, in some cases, for many years, but there was no point in proposing them until the administration changed. Now that it has, here they are:

1. Add chemicals that cause global anthropogenic climate change (global warming)

This would be primarily CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide -- the Montreal Protocol chemicals, which also contribute to global warming, are already in TRI. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that this would be possible under current legal authority because chemicals can be added to TRI if they cause a sufficient adverse effect on the environment, which GHGs are now known to do. The statute does refer to the adverse effect as being due to toxicity, so this interpretation is not certain. But if new authority is needed, it's going to be gotten anyways -- the Obama administration plans to do something about global warming, and you can hardly do anything about it without tracking emissions.

I can understand that people who want to track GHGs may want a new database designed for that particular purpose. (Currently EPA and DOE have a patchwork of databases, none of which were really designed for that, and which are going to have to be replaced.) TRI has certain limitations as a database tracking GHGs; what, for example, would be done about transportation sources, like fleets of trucks? But it seems to me that these chemicals should be added to TRI in any case, even if another database is created to specifically track them, as a cross-check. The information would also then benefit from TRI's well-developed distribution paths and user base. And TRI would come closer to matching other countries' PRTRs, several of which added GHGs quite a few years ago.

2. Change range reporting and speciation reporting of highly toxic chemicals

Since the beginning of TRI, people have faced the problem that TRI most easily allows comparison of raw pounds of chemicals -- but some chemicals are much more toxic than others, and some releases affect more people than others. These problems are attacked by a (in my opinion) excellent program within EPA called RSEI. But whenever there is a data release using data from RSEI -- most recently, the USA Today report -- the same thing happens, a facility reports a release range of 11-499 pounds of a highly toxic chemical like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, and this rightly is converted by EPA into the midpoint of the range, 250 pounds. (I blogged about a case of this here). 250 pounds is generally a very large release, for these chemicals, and it makes facilities pop up as major polluters and wastes everyone's time as people have to track down what is really going on. Most often, it turns out that the facility either thinks that its releases are towards the bottom of the range, or they don't release the more dangerous form of a chemical with two or more forms -- hexavalent vs trivalent chromium, for instance.

EPA could help both the reporting facilities and the public by changing the reporting rules. First, for those highly toxic chemicals that have more than one common form, EPA could require that each form be reported separately. This is already done for Dioxin. Second, EPA could prevent release and transfer range reporting from being used for these chemicals, or at least warn people who report through the TRI-ME reporting software what they are about to do.

3. Fix the Form A.

I won't write about attempts to roll back Form A reporting to what it used to be; that's already being done by various people. But whether the expanded Form A is rolled back or not, EPA should change the way in which it treats already-reported Form A data. A Form A should be treated as a range report, in the same way as TRI release and transfer ranges are treated. If someone sends in a current Form A for a non-PBT chemical, they are reporting that they release not more than 2000 pounds of the chemical, and generate in waste not more than 5000 pounds. This is not zero pounds. In fact, it's a range: 0-2000 pounds for releases, and EPA should use its well-established procedure for handling release ranges and take the midpoint, converting this to a quantity within the database of 1000 pounds. This would preserve the TRI reporter's ability to not have to take the time to fill out the additional information required for a Form R, but it would also give the public a more accurate estimation, based on best available information, of what is going on. If a TRI reporter didn't want the public to assume that the best guess was 1000 pounds, they always have the option of choosing to fill out a Form R and reporting any number of pounds, including zero.

This procedure is currently used for TRI data provided by RTK NET (described here), so I know that it's both possible and easy to do. The release media (air, land, or water) can't be determined, but a general Form A pseudo-release-medium can be assigned. No change in how facilities report would be required in order to do this; it could be done simply as an internal change in how EPA handles the data.

4. Fix Pollution Prevention Act reporting.

Pollution Prevention Act data were added to TRI in 1991, and they've never been able to be done exactly right. The waste data are currently reported as amounts recycled on and off site, burned for energy recovery on and off site, treated (destroyed) on and off site, and released or disposed of on and off site in various ways. But all of these numbers were supposed to add up to a single number, the quantity of the chemical in waste generated by the facility. That's because reporting these numbers was supposed to encourage source reduction, the practice of changing processes to reduce the amount of waste generated. But the regulation was sabotaged by ideologues at the Office of Management and Budget, and EPA was prevented from defining what a waste was, or something similar. So it could only require that facilities report the components that add up to the overall waste number, without really referring to it in a coherent way.

I don't know whether any actual change in reporting is required for this to happen -- perhaps just better guidance from EPA? Re-opening the issue with a new OMB? Perhaps having facilities total up their Section 8 waste quantities and report the total would help them realize what it's supposed to be for.

5. Re-open cooperation with other countries' PRTRs

I'm not sure where this stands, organizationally, and it's not the kind of thing I'd know about directly. (Although I have worked for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation on putting together a Web site to display combined U.S., Canadian, and Mexican PRTR data.) But it seems to me that EPA could have more of a sense of where chemicals within TRI stand within an international comparison. Just about the entire First World has some sort of PRTR -- does EPA track transfers from one country to another using multiple PRTRs? Could they, perhaps, report on how U.S. emissions of particular chemicals compare to those of other countries? I'd guess that more is being done on this score than I know about, but anything that EPA can do to make this kind of data more truly global would be highly valuable.

(I should probably note that I once tried to put together a proposal to make a free, publicly accessible database-backed Web site that would allow people to search all the PRTRs at once. I couldn't find a funder for it -- most charitable foundations and NGOs that I deal with focus on the U.S. That was a few years back, and I don't know whether anyone is doing that now, but it would still be a good idea.)

Saint-Gobain, Northampton, MA

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that all data posts will be in one place.

The fallout from the USA Today report mentioned in the last post is still settling, with politicians and Federal and state regulators promising various responses. I've heard that there's the usual rush of facilities, after a TRI report like this is released, to correct their reporting errors and/or explain their reports. But I'm getting involved with this locally too; a school that I've often biked past, and that some of my friends' kids go to, is listed as the third most potentially polluted from these industrial sources in Massachusetts.

Update: after new information was supplied by the facility, this is probably nothing to worry about: see below.

Looking at the site, 99% of the estimated risk is from a single polluter here, a Saint-Gobain facility. Looking up their TRI data here, as well as their RSEI data, it's clear that the estimated risk is due to their report of an air release of chromium compounds.

I've seen many, many facilities get themselves bad publicity by reporting in the way that this facility did, when they report something like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, something with a high toxicity or carcinogenicity. They reported an air release using a release range: 11-499 pounds. EPA routinely transforms this into the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds. That's a lot of chromium. In addition, EPA doesn't have respondents distinguish between hexavalent chromium, a known human carcinogen (and the chemical that Erin Brockovich campaigned against), and trivalent chromium, which isn't anywhere near as bad.

The facility should clarify this so that everyone can get a better idea of how much concern there should be. I called their TRI public contact on the phone, left a message, and got no response -- that's no surprise; I've been working with TRI data since 1991 and have never, ever gotten a response from a public contact. So I sent the following Email to their technical contact:

Dear Mr. (redacted): I am Emailing you because you are listed as the TRI (Toxic Release Inventory) technical contact for the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility in Northampton. I am an independent researcher living in Northampton who has worked with TRI data for some time, as well as the RSEI data used to make the USA Today report that references your facility at: http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/polluter/465 As you can see from this USA Today report, the Saint-Gobain facility causes the Montessori School of Northampton to rank in the top two percentile of schools nationwide in terms of schools whose air is potentially polluted by industrial facilities, as well as potentially affecting other Northampton schools. Looking at your TRI report at: http://data.rtknet.org/tri/tri.php?facility_id=01060SNTGB175IN&reporting_year=2005&datype=T&reptype=f&detail=4 and at the RSEI data, it is clear that the potential pollution in question is listed in your report as a release range of 11-499 pounds of chromium and chromium compounds to the air in 2005. EPA routinely treats release ranges of this sort as being equivalent to the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds. I have some questions about your TRI report and the facility's operations: 1. Do you have a better idea of how much chromium and / or chromium in compounds is actually released than 11-499 pounds? Getting a more accurate number could affect the RSEI risk screening calculation quite dramatically. 2. Do you have an idea, through testing or other means, of how much of the chromium is hexavalent chromium -- a known human carcinogen -- vs how much is trivalent [note: I originally wrote this as "chromium trioxide", oops.]? That would also lead to a better understanding of the potential risk involved. 3. Are there any plans possible or underway to reduce use of, or emissions of, chromium? Your 2006 TRI report, the latest publicly available, shows the same chromium release as in 2005. Thank you for your attention to this request for information. I plan on sharing your reply with other people who may be concerned about the chromium emissions from the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility. If you wish to contact me, I can be reached through Email, or by phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Best regards, Rich Puchalsky cc: (redacted), Montessori School of Northampton

I'll see what I response I get. Given that Saint-Gobain is a multinational, I'd guess that my missive may well get passed up quite a chain. But I plan on continuing to pursue this.

My guess is that the range reporting may well have inflated their reported number to be greater than what they actually released. But there's no way to know without asking them.

Update (12/12/2008): The facility says that the level of hexavalent chromium in the chromium they use is very low, so I'd think that this means there's no reason for undue concern. Their reply was:

We produce various ceramic powders used by our customers in coating applications. One of our products is trivalent chromium oxide used in wear resistance applications. This chromium product contains well over 99% trivalent chromium oxide. We have tested for hexavalent chromium oxide and the concentration tends to be around 50ppm in our product. As stated in the USA Today website that you reference “Chromium 3 (trivalent) is an essential nutrient and helps the body process proteins, sugars, and fats.” We believe that the emission values that you reference are a conservative estimate and the actual values are likely much less. The trivalenet chromium is present as a small particle like dust. We process our internal process air through “dust collectors” that are designed to remove 99.99% of the dust in the air. This treated air is then vented back into the building. We also utilize a plant wide central vacuum system for cleaning floors and equipment to minimize dust generation during cleaning. Therefore any trivalent chromium emissions are simply any minimal dust that may escape through open doors. As you can imagine the actual number would be difficult to measure, but we feel that the actual number is closer to 11 lbs than to 499 lbs per year.

My reply was:

Thank you for your reply. The RSEI model used to estimate the risk from your facility's chromium emissions assumes that air emissions of chromium are particulates, as is the case for your facility, but it also assumes, based on industry averages, that the percentage of hexavalent chromium in the chromium released would be 34%. An actual hexavalent chromium percentage of 1% (to round up) would then reduce the estimated risk to 1/34 of the original calculation. That would lower the concern about emissions from your facility to the point where the Montessori school, and other schools in Northampton, would no longer score high on a nationwide or statewide comparison of the kind used in the USA Today report. I should mention, however, that as far as I know, TRI estimates of releases are supposed to be made for the amount leaving the facility, not the amount "released" internally and then recollected before it reaches the outside. It's good to know that you have processes in place to reduce emissions, but the 11-499 pound estimate is presumably your estimate for the amount released to the air after your emission-control equipment has worked, not before. I encourage you to develop a better estimate of how much chromium is actually released, sufficient for you to report to TRI with your best estimate in pounds rather than as a range. Until that is done, the public can only assume that 250 pounds is the best guess, which leads to more concern about your facility than is warranted if the true number is actually much lower. Hexavalent chromium is by far the primary concern for air emissions, but there are some environmental processes that can change trivalent to hexavalent chromium under some conditions, so it's still of interest to people to know how much is being released.

And that is that. Really what is needed is some way to change TRI reporting to discourage this kind of report from happening -- reporting chromium speciation would be good (people already report dioxin speciation to TRI, so it can be done), and there might be a category of highly toxic chemicals that range reporting is not used for, or at least warned about. I'm going to take this up with EPA once the new administration is in place.

Toxic air and America's schools

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

There's an excellent report by USA Today that uses EPA reported pollution data and air modeling to estimate air quality at schools nationwide. It has a good database-backed Web site, too, that lets you look up your school, the schools with the worst air quality from those sources in your state, and so on.

I was involved very tangentially in this project -- I helped to work on data for PERI that USA Today used. I'm impressed by what USA Today did with it; it's better than the usual environmental toxics story. What PERI did was a bit complicated to explain, but I'll make the attempt -- there's a database, TRI, in which large industrial sources report their toxic pollution. A project within EPA, RSEI, takes the reported pounds of air pollution from each facility and runs an air model to see where the chemicals are going, geographically. They can then use Census data to see how many people live in each area affected by the pollution. They add all of this up into an overall risk screening score for each facility. PERI realized that these data could be obtained for each location on the ground, instead of being all added up to a single score for each facility. That lets you find the contribution of each polluter to a particular place where people live. (Or, in this case, where a school is.)

I only wish that I had the resources that USA Today does; their database-backed Web site is significantly more polished and user-friendly than I can generally make mine in the time that I have available to work on them. Learning how to embed databases into Google Maps is something I'm going to have to pick up. But there is one map graphic they created that I particularly wanted to call attention to: this -- or as a screenshot rather than an interactive map, so that I can show it here, the map below.

Compare this with the map of electric power generation by fuel source that I copied from eGRID for this earlier post. Or, for that matter, compare it with Joel Garreau's division of North America into "nine nations":

Industrial pollution near schools seems to be heavily concentrated in the areas of the country that Garreau refers to as Dixie and the Foundry. That's surprising, in some ways. Other places such as California certainly have industrial pollution too, but perhaps it's more spread out, or further away from city centers. Of course, this particular pollution map doesn't include non-point sources such as cars -- Los Angeles' smog problem gives it much worse overall air quality throughout its region than the vast majority of point-source-polluted sites. And this map doesn't include all sorts of other sources. But it's an example of how pollution is largely affected by regional patterns of development. If you were mapping environmental damage from mining waste, you'd get a different region of the U.S. highlighted -- national solutions to these problems often come down to regional politics.

Chemical security accident report released

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

The Center for American Progress has released Chemical Security 101: What You Don’t Have Can’t Leak, or Be Blown Up by Terrorists. Whatever the awkwardness of the title, the report is excellent, identifying the 100+ most hazardous chemical facilities in the U.S. and listing specific actions they could take to change their operations to eliminate the hazard, rather than treating the problem as one for gates and guards. I'm familiar with the report because I spent a significant amount of time crunching numbers for part of it.

If and when I get through global warming databases on this blog, I'll write about chemical accident ones. The database used for this report, the Risk Management Plan database, has a particularly interesting history. The chemical industry and the Bush administration crippled what was supposed to be a publicly accessible database by restricting access to it to reading rooms where you could only get information on ten facilities at a time. Otherwise, they said, terrorists would use the data for targeting, even though all the actual incidents so far have been straightforward industrial accidents. And then they proceeded to block one law after another that would have required industry to actually do anything to protect people from these hazards. Computer people like to talk about Security Through Obscurity -- well, this was year after year of Security Theater For Obscurity.

eGRID

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

This is the second post in a series on global warming data, about the basics of U.S. EPA's eGRID database.

eGRID's home page claims that it is “the preeminent source of air emissions data for the electric power sector,” and as for as the U.S. is concerned, that is probably true. It contains air emissions data for nitrogen oxides (Nox) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are of concern because they contribute to ground-level smog and acid rain. It contains data on emissions of mercury, a persistent bioaccumulative toxic. And it contains data on emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). It also has information on how much power is generated, and how much fuel of each type is used, so that you can see how efficient each plant is.

eGRID is an odd database in that it's not a data collection; no one ever fills out a form to report their emissions to eGRID. Instead, it's a combination of data from various data collections, together with model estimates. Most of the data that go into eGRID were originally collected through a scatter of databases held by EPA and the Department of Energy. For EPA for the last decade or more, it's been very difficult to get any new, major data collections, so information has to be cobbled together from a number of sources, none of them designed to exactly address the problem.

One of the advantages of a yearly data collection is that it has to be released every year. The primary disadvantage of eGRID, in the past, was that it came out irregularly and by the time it came out it sometimes used old versions of the data sources that it drew from. For instance, it's been released about once a year since 1998, except that it wasn't between May 2003 and Dec 2006. The Dept. of Energy databases that it draws from currently seem to be available up through 2006, and eGRID only has data through 2005. Still, a version has just been released – as of October 2008 – and that makes it up-to-date enough for all but the most picky and expert uses.

One of the large advantages to using eGRID is that some data quality work has been done to match the various databases together. I had to do that once, for a report for an environmental group that we couldn't use eGRID data for, and it's something that you don't want to do unless you have no other choice. Even more important, it upgrades all plant ownership, parent company, merger data and so on to a single date: December 31 2007 in this case. Electric utilities try all sorts of tricks to confuse their paper trail or to take advantage of regulatory exemptions or make financial maneuvers; there has been a lot of buying and selling of power plants among various entities. Making sure that all of that is upgraded to a single date is a significant advance. What this means is that, for instance, a power plant that last reported in 2005 will be listed in eGRID as being owned by whichever company owned it on Dec 31 2007, not by whatever company owned it in 2005.

eGRID is used in all sorts of regulatory initiatives, for environmental disclosure, and in governmental and nonprofit electricity-information Web sites such as Power Profiler, Power Scorecard, or CARMA. If you have a casual interest in your local electric power, you're probably better off with one of those. But it's good for some people to look at eGRID, because more information is available through it directly, and because it sets the baseline that so many people work from.

There are a couple of reasons why eGRID may not be the best source for generally tracking electricity, as opposed to tracking sources of emissions due to electricity generation. For one thing, it doesn't include any purchases of power, e.g. from Canada. For another, the net generation amounts that it reports subtract generation used by the power plant itself, but don't take transmission and distribution losses into account, so the electricity that people actually use will have a lower efficiency with respect to emissions than is reported in eGRID.

So how do you use eGRID? It's really just a set of three Excel files, so all you do is download them and open them on your computer – you can use OpenOffice. The most basic file holds information for each generating plant, and for subunits within plants. A second file, the aggregation file, adds things up – it combines individual plants into totals by state, owner, operator, parent company, grid, and for the whole U.S. That has almost all of the same data fields as the plant file, so once you learn one of them, you learn the other. The third of the files is for state imports and exports, and you can probably ignore it.

(Note, though, that the aggregation file handles parent companies badly, in my opinion. The people who made eGRID considered a parent company to be a holding company, not whatever company ultimately controls the plant, including the plant itself if there is no other owner. Therefore, some plants in eGRID don't have parent companies. That means that the parent company file, unlike the other aggregations, doesn't add up to the total of the individual plants. I may try to get the people who make eGRID to change this, put in a parent company for every plant, and indicate whether a parent company is a holding company or not with some kind of data field.)

But the plant file is probably the most useful. EPA doesn't like to release information about individual plants, or companies, within its general summary documents which are all that most people see if they see anything. It likes to release numbers about states, regions, industries, and so on, but saying that specific company ABC is responsible for x percent of pollution? You'll very rarely see that from EPA. So you'll have to dig it out for yourself.

The plant file contains sheets on generators and boilers: components of plants. Most users will probably skip those, although it's worth noting that they include years when the equipment went in service, which can be important for some things. But you'll probably want the information on plants themselves. There's about 5000 of them. You can look at the eGRID technical docs to explain the data elements.

What are some of the more useful data elements? Well, for the purpose of global warming, I'll look at CO2, ignoring methane and N2O for now. That's “plant annual CO2 emissions (tons)”, or PLCO2AN. A quick descending sort of the sheet by that field, and the top plant is the Scherer plant in Georgia, whose parent company is Southern Co. With 26 million tons of CO2, that's one percent of the total CO2 emissions for the whole database right there. There's only 68 plants that emitted more than 10 million tons. Those 68 plants account for 36% of the total emissions from electricity generation. That's about 12% of the total U.S. CO2 emissions from all sources, including cars, industry, houses, and residential electricity used by those light bulbs that people are always telling you to change whenever you say that we need to do something about global warming.

But those plants generate electricity too, of course. How much? Well, there the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a single power plant might generate electricity from a wide range of fuels. So just totaling up all the electricity from those plants is going to be a bit off. But I can total up the net generation from combustion sources for them. It's 31% of total U.S. generation from combustion sources – we're getting 36% of the CO2 for 31% of the power from combustion. It's 22% of our power from all sources.

What I'd like to see for these top plants is how efficient they are in burning coal. Coal is worse, from a CO2 standpoint, than natural gas, and coal burning efficiency varies by the equipment and the grade of coal used. But I can't quite see how to do it. The database includes an efficiency number that divides emissions of CO2 by the net generation from all combustion sources, but that includes oil and gas as well as coal. There's a net generation only from coal number, but there doesn't appear to be a CO2 emissions only from coal number, so I don't see how to figure out an emissions rate that includes only coal in both the numerator and denominator. Perhaps I could get it by digging into the boiler and generator data – but this post is too long as it is.

So, finally, here's a table of the 6 largest plants for 2005 for CO2 emissions, those with more than 20 million tons. You could get these yourself through the eGRID tables, but I might as well list them here for Google indexing purposes:

Top U.S. CO2 Emitting Electric Power Plants, 2005

State	Plant name	Plant operator	Parent company	2005 CO2 tons
GA	Scherer	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	26,040,793.5
AL	James H Miller Jr	Alabama Power Co	Southern Co	22,509,466.8
GA	Bowen	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	22,156,373.7
IN	Gibson	Duke Indiana Inc	Duke Energy	21,746,394.3
TX	Martin Lake	TXU Generation Co LP	Energy Future Holdings (TXU)	21,593,119.5
TX	W A Parish	NRG Energy		20,703,129.9

Global warming -- U.S. sources

This is a copy of an old post from my personal blog, placed here so that data posts will be all in one place.

Global warming -- or anthropogenic global climate change, to be more exact -- is one of the most critical contemporary environmental problems. It's also one that the Obama administration has promised to do something about. It's safe to assume that in a couple months, various proposals are going to begin to fly. What data do we have that would bear on these proposals? Over those months, I'm going to go over some of the material here. It's a good excuse to refamiliarize myself with it, since the last time I worked with it was in 2003.

I'm not going to address the science at all, or engage in any way with global warming denialists. The evidence that this is a real and important problem is unequivocal at this point, and anyone wanting more information on it should check out the IPCC, or if they prefer a group blog, RealClimate, or if they prefer more chatty, individual blogs: Deltoid, Stoat, Rabett Run, Only In It For the Gold, or More Grumbine Science.

The questions I'm going to look at bear more on politics and infrastructure. Where are the largest sources of the problem? Who owns them? How can people get information that helps them figure out their local power structure, if it comes down to local or state politics rather than national politics?

Global warming is caused by releases of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, CO2. The overall U.S. estimates of human sources of these gasses are in the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory. Looking at its Executive Summary, the total sources for 2006, the latest year available, were about 7000 Tg Co2 equivalents. (Don't worry about the units for now; just think of it as 7000 something.) Where did that come from? 2,300 was from electricity generation. 1,850 was from fossil fuels burned for transportation. 860 was from fossil fuels burned for industrial use, 330 residential, and all other types of sources were smaller. That means that roughly a third of the problem is from electric power plants, a quarter is from cars and other vehicles, and about a tenth from large industrial uses. Those three together make up more than 70% of the problem.

And those three types of sources are susceptible to infrastructural / political intervention. Affected industries' preferred defenses involve either saying that the market should decide, or diffusing responsiblity to consumers -- as if individual volunteerism like replacing light bulbs or turning down the thermostat a few degrees or driving a few less miles could really have enough of a cumulative effect to matter. (These actions can help, yes, but in the end you need to change infrastructure. I may get into that in a future post.) But no one builds a large power plant without governmental involvement; it's not really a market decision. The miles per gallon of car fleets is already regulated. And individual, large sources respond to pressure from organized communities.

Electricity generation is clearly the largest single piece. What is the picture for current sources? Here's the best map I could find, for 2005:

That map is from eGRID, one of the best U.S. databases available when it's up-to-date. You may not be able to read the legend, but the black color is coal, the worst fuel from a greenhouse gas perspective. There's a few major things to notice. First, large hydro, the blue color, already dominates the areas where it's available. Nuclear, in red, has a substantial presence, but no more is going to be built any time soon. California and New England are already starting to diversify. The Mountain West and midwest isn't, but the emissions are comparatively small there in any case. The most immediate problem areas are Texas and the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Pennsylvania corridor.

The political situation in Texas may not be the greatest, but Texas has abundant potential solar and wind energy resources, and my guess is that it's going to take advantage of them. The corridor is where I think local or state action might be most important.

What kind of information might assist in that action? Well, with a database like eGRID, people can identify which actual plants, owned by which companies, are producing the majority of the problem. And then there's a number of different outcomes people can push for -- shutting down coal plants and building renewable energy plants are only the most obvious ones. One type of early intervention can be made through efficiency improvements at existing power plants.

Imagine a set of ten coal-burning power plants, all alike. If you want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% and keep the same electricity generation, one way to do it is to shut one of them down and build a renewable power plant with the same output. But another way is to increase the efficiency at which the plants convert coal into electricity by about 10% so that you can shut one of them down and not build anything. We're going to want to eventually shut the coal plants down and replace them, of course. But putting in new equipment, such as more efficient turbines, can be cheaper and quicker for the initial stages.

A database like eGRID has information on every individual electric generating plant in the U.S. -- power generated, greenhouse gas emissions, and even some information on how up-to-date the equipment is. Using it, people can change the problem from a big, fuzzy one involving "large power companies" into one in which they know where their power is being generated, where the greenhouse gas sources are, and which source contributes what. That suggests points of potential pressure.

Perhaps that pressure won't be necessary -- perhaps a national cap-and-trade program will be implemented, and the problem will magically be solved by pseudo-market means. (I have my doubts about that, too.) Perhaps the data won't really be useful to local or state groups, or will be insufficient. Perhaps they will be useful to national policy people, although they have their own researchers for summarizing this kind of thing. But the particular tool of public access to data is the area that I know something about, so I'm going to assume that it's going to be useful to someone.

The next post in this series will be about eGRID.