Combined Air Emissions Reporting Project 'Common Emissions Form' Pilot

摘要

Currently, an industrial facility that emits air toxics could be subjected to multiple reports. It could be required to submit an annual report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). It may also need to submit an annual or triennial emission report to its state jurisdiction. In many cases, the emission data reported to state jurisdictions are submitted by the state jurisdictions to EPA, and used in the National Emission Inventory (NEI). Those reports use different formats, different reporting schedules, and different routes of data transfer, but contain a lot of overlapped information. The states, EPA, and tribes are collaboratively working on an E-enterprise initiative to modernize business processes, drive, and share innovations across agencies and programs. One of the projects under the initiative is the Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) project. One subproject of the CAER was to research consistency and possible workflows for sharing of emissions data between TRI, State/Local/Tribal (SLT) air toxics emission inventories, and NEI. Phase I of the subproject identified differences in terminology used to define reporting requirements in TRI and NEI programs; identified pollutants that are common between the TRI and NEI, and specified how they relate to each other if there is not a one-to-one match; and researched how states use TRI data for their NEI submissions. This paper will provide a brief description on results of the subproject Phase I. It will also provide a detailed analysis on the findings and challenges in harmonizing data in TRI with the state air toxics emission inventory using a case study from Minnesota.