title: Assessing vanadium and arsenic exposure of people living near a petrochemical complex with two-stage dispersion models.
abstract: The goal of this study is to demonstrate that it is possible to construct a two-stage dispersion model empirically for the purpose of estimating air pollution levels in the vicinity of petrochemical plants. We studied oil refineries and coal-fired power plants in the No. 6 Naphtha Cracking Complex, an area of 2,603-ha situated on the central west coast of Taiwan. The pollutants targeted were vanadium (V) from oil refineries and arsenic (As) from coal-fired power plants. We applied a backward fitting method to determine emission rates of V and As, with 192 PM10 filters originally collected between 2009 and 2012. Our first-stage model estimated emission rates of V and As (median and 95% confidence intervals at 0.0202 (0.0040-0.1063) and 0.1368 (0.0398-0.4782) g/s, respectively. In our second stage model, the predicted zone-average concentrations showed a strong correlation with V, but a poor correlation with As. Our findings show that two-stage dispersion models are relatively precise for estimating V levels at residents' addresses near the petrochemical complex, but they did not work as well for As levels. In conclusion, our model-based approach can be widely used for modeling exposure to air pollution from industrial areas in countries with limited resources.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chia-Pin
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Chio
authors.affiliation: Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Tzu-Hsuen
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; Green Energy and Environment Research Laboratories, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Ruei-Hao
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Shie
authors.affiliation: Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Electronic address: ccchan@ntu.edu.tw.
authors.forename: Chang-Chuan
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Chan
mesh_terms: D000393:Air Pollutants / Q000032:analysis*; D001151:Arsenic / Q000032:analysis*; D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000032:analysis*; D006801:Humans; D066192:Manufacturing Industry; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010578:Petroleum; D014639:Vanadium / Q000032:analysis*
chemical_list: D000393:Air Pollutants; D010578:Petroleum; D014639:Vanadium; D001151:Arsenic
keywords: Arsenic; Industrial source complex (ISC); Naphtha cracking; Petrochemicals processing; Pollution; Vanadium