High-Resolution Source Mapping to Minimize Impacts of Waste Biomass Distributed Generation on Ozone Air Quality in Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley

Increasing the technical and environmental performance, value, and reliability of waste-toenergy bioenergy systems can facilitate meeting California’s energy and greenhouse-gas emission-reduction mandates. California’s San Joaquin Valley, with its abundant biomass waste streams, has long been out of compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone, contributing to some of the worst pollution burdens in the state. Understanding how to ease this pollution burden given the planned future scaling up of waste-biomass distributed generation, is critically needed for this region. This project conducts a first-of-its-kind study that quantifies the relative importance of individual-source locations based upon their impacts on existing ozone burdens to disadvantaged communities and ambient air quality nonattainment areas. The key geospatial datasets developed from this project provide quantitative estimates of the ozone impact potential of individual model grid locations. These estimates can enable quick and accurate evaluation of the environmental costs and benefits of waste biomass-to-energy facility deployment strategies and scenarios in the planning stages. The analysis tool and framework developed through this project can be extended in future work to include other criteria pollutants or greenhouse gases in other major air basins in California.