Fat Tails and Emissions Inventories for Oil Gas Production Facilities

摘要

When performing emissions inventories, outliers matter. It is entirely likely that the data set consisting of all facilities emitting air pollution within an airshed will exhibit a heavy-tailed distribution with a fat tail to the right (positive skew). That is, a small number of facilities will be responsible for a disproportionately large amount of the air pollution emitted. Therefore, when estimating emissions from the entire universe of non-point source facilities, it is better to multiply the arithmetic mean of the data set by the number of facilities. Multiplying the median facility's emissions by the total number of facilities will yield an erroneously low estimate of total emissions.