BeijingAirblog.com

It seems Beijing will reach its Clear Sky Days target of 245 days for 2007; with 33 days to go, we already have had 229 days with API less or equal to 100, so we only need 16 more (leaving out the mystery day of 20 August). Applause for all the officials who worked hard to accomplish this. But wait, there is more to this, read on.

If we change the interpretation of Clear Sky Day to an API less than 100 (not counting the days with exactly 100) then we have only 220 days and still need 25 out of 33 which is most probably not going to happen, so the difference between making the target and not making it is in fact very small.. But SEPA does include an API of 100 in its grade 2 ‘good’ so it counts as a Clear Sky Day.

Making a histogram of the API values of 2007 (counting the occurences of values), we see that the most occuring values are:

• 98 (21 days)
• 99 (11 days)
• 100 and 95 (both 9 days)

Isn’t that wonderfully helpful that the values tend to stay just on the good side of 100? The value of 101 has not even occurred ONCE, and see the amazing drop after 100.. The guy in charge of publishing these API data deserves a promotion, the government’s target will be met!

Last week i noticed that the SEPA English homepage did not display the updated API numbers (it did work on the Chinese homepage), so i wrote them a short email to ask to fix it, to the contact email address (info2@zhb.gov.cn) that they provide on the same page. One week later still no answer, but the API values are back now, although clicking to get the complete list gives an error ’sorry, no record’ and obviously the pollution grades are messed up as well.

Also their latest news release ‘China reports decline in major pollutant emissions (20071114)’ is a dead link, hallelujah.

From the Chinese homepage, you can still get to the list of daily API values, and you can make queries using the section at the bottom of the page. There you can find out we had an API of 269 on 25 November!! That is the second worst day this year, after 5 January. Strange that our near neighbour Tianjin did not have any special peak on that day.

This week the first hydrogen refueling station in Shanghai was opened for fuel cell vehicles (FCV). The UN will sponsor a fleet of fuel cell buses by 2009, as it has done in Beijing. The articles state that in Beijing and Shanghai, public buses are among the main contributors to air pollution, so that is definitely good news, although in Beijing the project seems to be limited to 3 buses only- the official website (in the usual horrible official Chinese website style) has more information on the challenges. But something seems to be moving because SEPA has mentioned that it is working with various ministries to introduce a pollution tax for car drivers for exhaust of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide.

Over the last few weeks 2 great new database systems have come online related to air quality/emissions:

• CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) shows CO2 emissions of power plants all around the world, which is more related to Green House Gases, but i mention it here because the website’s release seems to have had quite some impact globally. The website allows to compare the CO2 emissions and intensity between continents, countries, power companies and power plants. For example we see that the highest worldwide C02 emitting power company is Huaneng Power International, with 44 plants across China, and that its intensity (rate of emissions per generated energy) has actually worsened since 2000, but is scheduled to improve again, although not to the 2000 level. Elsewhere we can see that the Three Gorges power plant is the second biggest power station after Brasil’s Itaipu, both with zero CO2 emissions. The Three Gorges currently produces only around 26% of the power generated by Huaneng, but it is planned to double its capacity in the future. Check out the situation around Beijing.

• EPA (USA Environmental Protection Agency) provides a Google Earth file with USA data on industrial sources of the air pollutants carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide. You can generate your own file for specific areas and air pollutants. Below screenshot shows the total emissions in the are of Houston, Texas. Let’s hope SEPA gets some inspiration from this.